Monday, December 31, 2018
Best albums I listened to: 2018
Best books I read: 2018
I read some truly awesome books this year. I think the non-fiction I read will stick with me a bit longer, since much of it deals with contemporary political issues, but somehow, even though much of my fiction I read dipped its toes back into the waters of Greek mythology and philosophy, I appreciated the way it felt new again. It was incredibly difficult to whittle down my read list to 5 each.
If you're looking to read only a single fiction book, Helen DeWitt's novel was fantastic. For non-fiction, I've found myself referencing and thinking about John Stuart Mill more than anything else.
Fiction:
Paul Cooper - River of Ink. Here's a great little piece of historical fiction about a time period I didn't know anything about - the invasion and attempted conquest of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha in 1215 AD - that manages to be densely researched, well-written, and satisfying on a storytelling level all at once. Cooper fits an impressive amount of research into the details of the Sinhalese-Tamil struggle, the kingdom, the palace, the food, the clothing, etc, in here, and while he drops in maybe a few too many untranslated terms for the prose to be completely smooth reading for a non-Sri Lankan, if you just relax and go with the atmosphere eventually you're so fully immersed you hardly notice it, especially because he's so descriptive and detailed. It's a novel about translation, bother personal and literary, which means it must also necessarily convey something about the difficulty of communication, and the melancholy love story that accompanies the war for control of the kingdom makes the personal political, adding a welcome human element to the mix of literary commentary and political struggle.
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai. Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here.
George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman. Superb historical fiction, all the more notable for having one of the all-time antiheroes as its protagonist. Fast-paced, well-plotted, bitterly cynical, funny, and full of well-researched historical detail, you almost couldn't ask for a better pulp experience. It was written as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a spoiled rich kid bully with a great talent for getting out of jams and having his character flaws interpreted as virtues, who's reluctantly forced into the army and spends the rest of the book shirking every responsibility he can en route to completely undeserved glory and fame thanks to the public's need for a hero. He's a total scumbag on basically every page (lazy, cowardly, misogynistic, greedy, lecherous, racist, untrustworthy, etc), and half of the time you're actually pulling for the Plot Armor protecting him to let up and give him what he deserves (in addition to his constant good luck at small things, there's more than one "this is the end, there's no possible way Flashman will get out of this one!" cliffhangers resolved neatly by a timely deus ex machina or fade to black), yet he seems to be the only one capable of understanding the sheer folly of the British experience in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and of imperialism/colonialism more generally.
Min Lee - Pachinko. "History has failed us, but no matter" belongs up there in the pantheon of opening lines, and it's especially apt, given that this is not quite a "historical novel", but a novel which uses the vicissitudes of real history - the Japanese occupation and annexation of Korea, the migration of Koreans to Japan for work, the devastation of WW2, the partition of Korea - to follow an ordinary Korean peasant family from the very early part of the 20th century near to its end as successive generations experience poverty, fall in love, settle in Japan, try to make money, survive wars, encounter racism, and, most of all, try to turn their sorrows into fulfilling lives. Korean history is something I have large gaps of understanding in relative to Japanese and Chinese history, particularly prior to WW2, so I would have appreciated this novel even if it hadn't been so affecting. Many questions of Korean identity are raised repeatedly by Koreans, South Koreans, North Koreans, and Korean-Japanese; I don't have any special take on that, but for me the pleasure of the novel lies in how these lovingly rendered characters make their choices, and how those choices define their lives but also present new opportunities even when they're really painful. Pachinko is, of course, a popular game for gamblers, and the central idea that fate and freedom are present in every moment is very movingly presented here.
Jo Walton - The Just City. Plato's Republic is one of the most-debated thought experiments of all time, but I'd always seen the critiques/reflections/responses to Plato's speculations on civic virtue in serious academic writing, so it was very refreshing to see someone think about the Republic in narrative form, and as a fantasy novel no less. What would actually living in the ideal city look like? How would you set it up, keep it running, deal with challenges? Karl Popper spent the whole Volume 1 of The Open Society criticizing the Republic as a totalitarian nightmare state (the classes of citizens, the abhorrence of trade, the idea that as long as the rulers are smart and virtuous enough nothing can go wrong), but in Walton's hands, for many of the characters it's much freer than the societies they came from, a practical lesson in applied ethics and the relativity of idealism that couldn't be obtained any other way. Once Walton has set up the premise - Athena has gathered thousands of people from across time in a recreation of Plato's Republic in part to teach Apollo, fresh off of Daphne's escape from his advances via transformation into a laurel tree, important insights about morality and mortality - the characters, including Socrates, have to work within the structures they've chosen and been chosen for to build the lives they want. Utopian societies have a long and honorable place in fiction, such as Francis Spufford's superb evocation of the Soviet 60s in Red Plenty, but it was very satisfying to see the Just City, the ancestor of them all, treated according to its own premises, and as one character says, "Nobody reads Plato and agrees with everything. But nobody reads any of the dialogues without wanting to be there joining in."
Non-Fiction:
Navid Kermani - Between Quran and Kafka. I love the "literary synthesis" essay subgenre, where an author who's widely read and deeply thoughtful traces the connections between literature and the broader world at their leisure, unlocking hidden insights from silent texts with the help of their brethren. Kermani is ethnically Persian but culturally German, and so most of these essays link elements of German culture, particularly the great authors of the past, to their Islamic counterparts, in often surprising but always logical ways. The Koran is the fundamental text of not merely Islam but also Islamic culture; this gives Kermani plenty to talk about in regards to its influence, although he regrets its near-hegemonic dominance. German literature has no comparable single text, but certain authors come up again and again, most prominently Kafka. Kermani talks very personally about what Islam and Germany mean to him, but like all worldly writers, his interests are far too broad to be confined: not only does the title neatly sum up the major preoccupations of the book, it balances his Iranian heritage and German birth, and also faith and doubt, belonging and alienation, and parochialism and universalism.
Charles Mann - The Wizard and the Prophet. Both of Mann's previous books, 1491 and 1493, described in great detail how various societies have interacted with local and global ecology, but never before has he offered such a clear framework for thinking about the reasons why humanity can't resist the urge to mold our environment to our activities and not the other way around, and drawn such clear lines between different approaches to nature. This is a full-length expansion of "The State of the Species", his 2012 essay for Orion magazine, wherein he compared humanity to a rapidly bacteria that is just beginning to reach the edge of its petri dish and faces a stark choice between a catastrophic decline in numbers or a gradual accommodation to the limits of future possibilities. The first attitude he terms the Prophet mindset, personified by William Vogt, a bird ecologist whose research into guano production led him to warn that unchecked human activity would lead to calamitous resource shortages. The second stance is what he calls the Wizard mentality, represented by Norman Borlaug, a Nobel-winning crop scientist whose experiments with rice and wheat created the Green Revolution that fed billions of additional people. A worthy successor to the fascinating dialogues about environmentalism in John McPhee's peerless Encounters With the Archdruid, Mann's work is a detailed look at our efforts to defy what seems like an ecological equivalent to the law of gravity: that every species eventually hits the carrying capacity of its environment, and must choose between a calm acceptance of a ceiling to its ambitions or the grim process of decline due to overreach.
John Stuart Mill - Autobiography. The autobiography is such an ancient genre, St. Augustine having written his Confessions in 400 AD, that its conventions were already pretty fixed by the time that Mill finally completed his shortly before his 1873 death. His contribution to the genre is right in line with what we expect: an overview of his life, his work, his relationship (note the singular), and his likely legacy, balancing between honest modesty and fair self-regard. It's notable not just merely because of who he was - pioneering radical, influential politician, prescient philosopher, one of the most enduringly useful of the great modern thinkers - but because of how he thought, and though each chapter is written in that dense, fractally-claused 19th century style, the precision, honesty, and clarity of his sentiments comes across regardless. His descriptions of his own crisis of confidence, his admiration for his wife, and descriptions of his role in some of the most important political and philosophical debates of his time are still worth reading today, because aside from the historical recollections, he works in several other genres as well: implicit child-raising guide, a model for self-education and rational thinking, a self-help book on depression, advice on how to reform the political system from inside, and even some relationship goals. I'd previously read Nicolas Capaldi's biography of him and it's not bad, but there's nothing like going back to the source. This is definitely worth a stop after reading Utilitarianism and On Liberty.
David Reich - Who We Are and How We Got Here. This is absolutely the book to read if you're interested in genetic history, either your own or humanity's. Reich zooms out tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, far past most Big History books, discussing how the latest research on recent discoveries of ancient DNA has begun to make sense of the vast movements of peoples in the dim unremembered mists of time from before we have written records. The rapid pace of technological advancement in genetics research, to the point where we can reconstruct detailed models of peoples we know only from scattered bone fragments, is challenging a lot of what we thought we knew about the past (did humans really evolve solely in Africa? how many waves of migration from Asia to the Americas? how recently did modern racial categories form?), and as astonishing as it is to imagine that we can track the migration and reproductive patterns of long-vanished ethnicities and even extinct subspecies like Neanderthals and Denisovans, genetics has advanced to the point where we can even identify "ghost populations" in our modern genomes - long-dead ancestors who have left no trace of language, settlement, or literature, but whose migrations and mixings live on in our DNA. The rapid pace of discovery in this field means many specific conclusions might be in flux, but as Reich shows, the wealth of knowledge unlocked by DNA sequencing means fields like history and anthropology already have plenty to chew on. I haven't found this kind of rigorous, sustained investigation of the deep roots of our ancestry anywhere else.
Warren Treadgold - The Byzantine State and Society. Surely the best single-volume history of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire I've read, and perhaps the best one out there, despite being published in 1988. Copiously researched and well-organized, Treadgold balances alternating military/political chapters with economic/social chapters, so there is extensive coverage of not only the expected battles and dynastic cycles, but also the more humanistic aspects, with plentiful maps and tables of statistics on everything from military strength to budgetary woes to population distribution to help the reader keep track of how the Byzantines continuously tinkered with their society for over a thousand years in the face of continuous waves of plagues, invasions, and civil wars. While the Roman Empire will forever be more highly esteemed by laymen for how they steadily assembled their pan-Mediterranean state (everyone loves watching winners conquer one enemy after another), over the course of the book I developed a grudging and then unabashed respect for how the Byzantines did their best to adapt that rigid, ethnocentric, coup-prone Roman governance model to maintain a surprising amount of coherent identity in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multifariously-threatening world. They may have failed eventually, but you try creating an empire that lasts for over a millennium!
If you're looking to read only a single fiction book, Helen DeWitt's novel was fantastic. For non-fiction, I've found myself referencing and thinking about John Stuart Mill more than anything else.
Fiction:
Non-Fiction:
Friday, December 28, 2018
Book Review: Madeline Miller - Circe
I really enjoy the various spinoffs, tributes, and fanfictions based on Greek mythology, and though I'm sure it's theoretically possible to tire of yet another derivative of these stories, I'm still impressed with how creative people are still able to be with this millennia-old material. To my knowledge, Circe is the first novel to concentrate solely on its protagonist's life story as a tale unto itself, and Miller takes Circe's appearances in the Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony (or what's known of it) to portray her youth, exile, motherhood, and exit from Aiaia as a full narrative. It's not high-concept short stories, like Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, or an overwhelming modernist juggernaut, like James Joyce's Ulysses, or even a mock-drama, like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but a humble traditional novel about the relationships of parents to their children: Circe and Helios, Telegonus and Circe, Telemachus and Odysseus. I actually had not heard of the Telegony before reading this, so the full story of her and Odysseus' son Telegonus, and Circe's eventual romance with Odysseus' other son Telemachus, were new to me, and whereas in the Odyssey Circe is merely a pleasant stop for Odysseus on his way home, here Odysseus, with a well-captured dark side, is the key to her release from her long exile but far from the only part of her life with meaning. I don't think people will stop being fascinated by the caprices of the gods for many years yet, but Miller makes their human side not just understandable but even relatable.
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Book Review: Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai
Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here.
When you play bridge with beginners - when you try to help them out - you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.... People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones - when you look at each one as if you'd never seen one before, they all look alike.
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Book Review: Charles Mann - The Wizard and the Prophet
The book itself is, quite cleverly, structured into an analogue of the model of biological expansion it it proposes: an opening section discussing the philosophy of growth; profiles of the early careers of Vogt and Borlaug; four Element sections on the challenges of Earth (attempts to increase the yields of agriculture), Water (ensuring its future potability and availability), Fire (increasing the amount of usable energy), and Air (dealing with the issues of climate change); examinations of the later careers of Vogt and Borlaug as they each attempted to spread their philosophies; and then a brief final section reflecting on the difficulty of actually applying any of this knowledge in a useful way. Mann goes into more detail about the well-known Jevons paradox, where efforts to increase efficiency can actually increase the total amount of resources being used, in the appropriate Fire section, but right from the beginning you can think of the Wizards and Prophets as representing different arguments about the paradox. Efficiency by definition has a numerator and a denominator, and Wizards are arguing that since technological progress will mean that you won't run into absolute Malthusian limits on resources, you can keep population stable or even increase it as long as you also increase the efficiency of resource consumption, whereas Prophets would argue that Malthusian limits are inevitable, and therefore you either need to reduce the amount of people or accept drastically reduced standards of living.
The discovery that nitrogen played a vital role in fertilizer, and that guano's prodigious quantity of nitrogen would make it an excellent aid to crop yields, led to a run on the vast deposits of guano on Peru's Chincha Islands. Vogt helped formalize the ecological cycle of guano production: the fact that the El Niño cycle controlled the temperature of sea currents, hence affecting the quantity of plankton, hence affecting the population of seabirds, hence ultimately determining the amount of guano, placed in his view an upper bound on the rate at which guano could be sustainably harvested from the islands in order to ship off to grow crops. Meanwhile, Norman Borlaug's experiences in agronomy implied that there were not necessarily limits to seemingly immutable biological constraints. His research in Mexico focused on encouraging disease resistance in wheat: while developing a variety of wheat that was nutritious, hardy, high-yielding, good-tasting, and rust-resistant could be incredibly tedious and arduous, if a form of wheat could be developed that was resistant to blights and rusts, then at a stroke the problem of the recurrent famines that struck poor nations could be solved. Vogt's research implied that efforts to surmount an ecosystem's carrying capacity would just lead to catastrophes down the line, as seen in the recurrent booms and busts of the seabird population, but to Borlaug, there seemed to be no humane alternative but to try to provide more food.
Of course, to a Prophet, the Wizard approach seems perverse, as breeding better wheat just ultimately breeds more people, and so the four Element sections chronicle our attempts to kick the population can down the road. For Earth, Borlaug's development of better wheat fit into a grand heroic tradition of improvements to agriculture. Liebig's Law of the Minimum states that growth is limited by the scarcest factor, so past discoveries like the Haber-Bosch process to create artificial fertilizer and avoid the seabird bottleneck, and current projects, such as developing superior forms of photosynthesis like the C4 process in rice, are efforts to disprove the Malthusian maximum that population can increase geometrically while agricultural yields can only increase arithmetically. We are leaving money on the table in the form of inefficient agricultural strategies, but sustainable agriculture is difficult: corporate megafarms have acceptable yields and use little labor but are very wasteful and have a huge ecological footprint, whereas smaller and more energy-efficient farms could improve total yields but would require more labor, which for many people is a historical step backwards. Similarly, we could shift our diets to get more caloric bang for the buck, not just abandoning meat but also replacing fields of wheat, rice, and maize with fields of cassava, potato, and sweet potato and orchards of bananas, apples, and chestnuts. This would give us yields of far more calories per acre, at the cost of a radical transformation of every cuisine on earth.
For Water, similarly vast lifestyle changes might be in order. There's a continual sense that much of the world is running on borrowed time when it comes to water supplies. Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert painted a grim picture of what the American West might look like once all the groundwater ran out; Southern California is the poster child for water conflicts, famously depicted in the movie Chinatown, but even though it's hard to innovate water supplies in the same way as modified wheat, Mann profiles Israel's National Water Carrier project and drip irrigation systems, which are both "hard path" and "soft path" attempts, respectively, to make every drop go farther. Mann explains that there's a philosophical split between the "hard path" of large centralized water projects, like the large dams and desalinization projects beloved of engineers, and the "soft path" of smaller solutions, like collecting stormwater or reusing wastewater. Water has been treated as a semi-public good in most countries, with cheap consumer prices on top of a vast web of complex political arrangements; privatizing water supplies is anathema to most voters, and yet decisions about how to best maximize remaining groundwater supplies will have to be made, with profound consequences. Mann doesn't cite Karl Wittfogel's infamous "hydraulic despotism" thesis about how many ancient empires used their control over water supplies to maintain power, but a future of dam/canal/aqueduct/desalinization plant megaprojects might be very different politically than one of more distributed and small-scale solutions oriented around conservation and reuse, even without veering into Mad Max/Dune science-fiction territory.
This basic division between proponents of small and large solutions to problems is recapitulated in the Fire section, which concerns energy production. I remember that Peak Oil used to be in the news quite frequently in the mid-to-late 00s, as gas prices spiked, but you don't hear so much about it these days. The worry was that the suburban lifestyle was artificially cheap, due to underpriced oil, and thus doomed to collapse when gas prices made big cars/long commutes/spread-out development unaffordable. That hasn't come true (yet?), but it's interesting that people have been mispricing oil since it was first discovered (there's a funny anecdote about Andrew Carnegie digging a big reservoir of crude oil in anticipation of a big price spike caused by the exhaustion of oil supplies, seeing that there was plenty more where that came from, and then making tons of money anyway). Marion King Hubbert's idea of Peak Oil makes intuitive sense, which is one big reason why even energy corporations devote money to alternative fuels, yet the time has never seemed quite right for inventors like Augustin-Bernard Mouchot or John Ericsson to make money off of their solar power designs.
I wish Mann had devoted more space to talking about the vast improvements in solar energy production spurred by Obama's 2009 stimulus, but often a big stumbling block is not so much the specific technology as how it's deployed; he discusses the opposition of many environmentalists to big solar or wind projects. I myself have similar annoyances with climate activists who won't just take the W and accept that replacing large coal plants might require large solar farms, since some of their objections are also disguised NIMBYism (see the opposition to wind farms off of Martha's Vineyard), but even if anti-nuclear sentiment is often overblown, it is incontrovertible that big projects can have big downsides, and that smaller solutions need more visibility as well.
The Air chapter is all about climate change. Mann spends most of the section discussing the history of atmospheric science, from Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier's theories of thermostatic equilibrium, to John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, and Guy Callendar's discoveries of how powerful of a warming agent carbon dioxide is. I've always had a deep respect for how difficult it is to build working models of anything, and so I appreciated Mann's explication of the intellectual work it took to go from learning that the composition of the air matters to the IPCC's current efforts to build climate models that will actually tell us something useful and accurate. Of course, the science is meaningless if we ignore it, so there's some discussion of how hard it is for humans to make rational decisions in the present about hypothetical future people. It's not worth saying much about climate change deniers, who at this point aren't going to be convinced by any quantity of graphs and charts. There's simple greed and ignorance, of course, but as efforts to address climate change have shifted from specific problems like sulfuric acid rain destroying forests or CFC's destruction of the ozone layer to more abstract issues like general carbon dioxide levels, it's become harder for even well-intentioned people to decide what to do.
A classic formulation of this dilemma is "if building coal plants is necessary for China to industrialize and therefore reduce poverty, is it moral to tell them to industrialize more slowly by using renewables instead, since the poor people are alive right now but most of the people who will suffer the consequences of climate change haven't been born yet?" If you're pondering the exact relations among economic growth, environmental destruction, and planetary limits, it's not obvious you'd start with limiting China's development as opposed to, say, here in the US. Mann visits China and points out that industrialization brings costs right now via air pollution, but even if you agreed that there's got to be a better way, it's not like even fairly stodgy solutions like carbon capture are uncontroversial, and geoengineering proposals range from wackier options like dumping sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to more plausible ones like Dune-style tree planting in the Sahara and the Outback. Shifting to renewables would bring vast new costs as well, and he relates a funny example of how difficult it would be to completely replace fossil fuels in the US:
Altogether, the Jacobson-Delucchi team estimated, the United States would need to build:
- 328,000 new onshore 5-megawatt (MW) wind turbines (providing 30.9 percent of U.S. energy for all purposes)
- 156,200 offshore 5-MW wind turbines (19.1 percent)
- 46,480 50-MW new utility-scale solar photovoltaic power plants (30.7 percent)
- 2,273 100-MW utility-scale concentrated solar power (i.e., Mouchot-style solar mirror) power plants (7.3 percent)
- 75.2 million 5-kilowatt (kW) home rooftop photovoltaic systems (3.98 percent)
- 2.75 million 100-kW commercial/government rooftop systems (3.2 percent)
- 208,100 1-MW geothermal plants (1.23 percent)
- 36,050 0.75-MW devices that harness wave power (0.37 percent)
- 8,800 1-MW tidal turbines (0.14 percent)
- 3 new hydroelectric power plants (all in Alaska, 3.01 percent)
As lagniappe, the nation also would convert all cars and trucks to run on electricity and all planes to run on supercooled hydrogen - all the while building underground systems that store energy by heating up rock under most of the buildings in the United States.
Mann returns to the fates of Vogt and Borlaug, after World War 2 when the new international order was being determined. Vogt attempted to raise environmentalism's profile by organizing events like the International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature and working for Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood, eventually alienating everyone but also inspiring influential works like MIT's The Limits to Growth and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. Much like Gifford Pinchot's hopeful vision of stewardship over nature won out over John Muir's anti-civilization wilderness promotion, people wouldn't have liked to hear Vogt's jeremiads even if he'd been more personable. Meanwhile, Borlaug tried to spread his hard-won knowledge to collaborators in other countries, like Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan in India. There's a really fascinating story of how Borlaug tried to ship some precious seeds of new wheat to Swaminathan from Mexico to India via Los Angeles during the Watts riots and the Kashmir War between India and Pakistan. There's also further thoughts on how even miracles like this wheat can struggle if they aren't adapted to the local palate. The wheat Borlaug had sent was western-style, which required further crossbreeding and irradiation to turn it into the Sharbati Sonora wheat that made acceptable roti to the Indians, which brought to mind current innovations like the non-meat Impossible Burger, which people are happy to eat, just as long as it looks and tastes exactly like a regular burger and fits exactly into current foodways and avoids "GMO" technologies that people don't understand. Science is always working uphill.
Mann closes the book with an account of an 1860 Samuel Wilberforce-Thomas Huxley debate about evolution. One of the key jabs that Wilberforce, who was arguing against evolution, tried to land was asking Huxley if he was descended from apes on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side. Hidden in there is a serious question about if humanity is subject to the same laws that seem to govern every other species. Earlier in the book Mann ruminated on a memorably depressing conversation with infamous biologist Lynn Margulis:
Was Margulis correct that we are fated by natural law to wreck our own future? History provides two ways of approaching this question. The first draws on the inspiring manner in which a group of scientific eccentrics and outsiders slowly built up today’s picture of climate change just in time to use that knowledge to halt its worst effects. The second focuses on the discouraging way that political institutions have been unable to grapple with the challenge and climate change became the subject of a cultural battle over symbols and values. The second approach leads to the conclusion that Margulis was correct: indecision and political tensions will give the opportunity for our wastes to destroy us. Only the first approach leads us to do something about climate change, following the path either of Wizards or of Prophets.
While Mann is hopeful that we can come to an accord with the world around us, even seemingly dramatic precedents in our history that imply that humanity can change, like women's suffrage or the abolition of slavery, come with plenty of caveats, most notably that they take time. All around us, there are warning signs of a world that is being profoundly shaped by human behavior, the "edge of the petri dish" is in sight, and it's quite uncertain that we will ever be able to work harmoniously within Earth's limits (sci-fi schemes of extraterrestrial colonies, Ã la Elon Musk, are a tacit acceptance of this). All we can do is try.
Monday, December 3, 2018
Book Review: David Warsh - Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations
Paul Krugman, whose work on trade and economic geography comes up frequently in this book, once wrote a really interesting and directly relevant essay in 1996 that somehow wasn't cited here. Titled "Ricardo's Difficult Idea", its main subject is the idea of comparative advantage, and why such a simple economic concept is so hard for most people to internalize and then apply. He grounds that difficulty in the observation that there are two very different ways of thinking about the world: literary/narrative and mathematical/model-based, which don't always agree (this is perhaps for deep-seated cognitive-evolutionary reasons). When most people, even many professional economists, think about economic issues the default is to view issues in terms of simple zero-sum stories. For example, if Chinese companies are outcompeting American companies, then by imposing trade tariffs on China, American companies will be stronger, and hence America as a whole will be richer. Simple!
This story has sounded very plausible for essentially all of human history, but explaining exactly why tariffs do not have the intended effects, and exactly how all sides become poorer from trade wars, requires an essentially mathematical understanding of economic logic that just does not come naturally to most people. Mathematical models by necessity make many simplifications of reality, but you can show how tariff revenue will almost certainly be smaller than costs to consumers in a simple diagram with just a few lines on paper, whereas forgoing the math means reverting to lengthy and complex expositions of concepts like deadweight loss, import/export price ratios, and currency exchange rates that sound plainly wrong to the uninitiated: what do you mean that making foreign products more expensive won't make us any richer?
Adam Smith faced precisely this difficulty in The Wealth of Nations, which is why it's so long and tedious to read today. Back then, the logic of specialization and division of labor had never really been laid out before, so Smith had to answer all the what-ifs and how-abouts at great length, just to be able to say that a pin factory can make more pins if each of the workers has specific steps of the pin-making process to perform. We can sum up in just a few neat equations what took him chapters to laboriously explicate, and another advantage of math is that it's easier to see when an idea has unexamined implications or hidden assumptions that lead to further problems.
In the case of the pins, what sounds like a neat story about how a pin factory sees increasing returns from specialization, thereby creating economic growth, becomes more complicated when you consider multiple pin factories. Here the infamous invisible hand, acting as it does to increase competition and therefore decrease returns, should encourage competing pin factories to jump into the market until the total economic profit in the pin industry nears zero (or else you could increase economic growth forever by building endless pin factories, video game-style). But any theory of increasing returns should logically grant the first pin factory an insurmountable advantage until they come to monopolize the pin market, so how is it that most markets we see, while individual companies might come and go, are not in fact dominated by monopolies? One force rewards the most efficient pin maker, the other rewards their competitors, and it took until the advent of mathematical modeling for economists to get a real handle on how specific markets could work in any sort of equilibrium even as the total economy grew.
Ironically that's where Warsh's storytelling comes in so handy, as the progression of economics from a narrative discipline to a mathematical discipline is itself better-presented as a narrative. I'm sure there are people who would prefer that concepts like the effect that the size of the market has on specialization (why big cities have so many more and different high-skill and high-paying jobs than small towns) be directly conveyed to the reader in terms of the equations alone, but Warsh devotes a chapter to a single presentation in 1985, Robert Lucas' "On the Mechanics of Economic Development", with a quote showing what that would look like:
Suppose there are N workers in total, with skill levels h ranging from 0 to infinity. Let there be N(h) workers with skill level h, so that N = N(h)dh. Suppose a worker with skill h devotes a fraction u(h) of his non-leisure time to current production, and the remaining 1–u(h) to human capital accumulation. Then the effective workforce in production - the analogue to N(t) in equation (2) - is the sum Ne = the indefinite integral of u(h)N(h)hdh of the skill-weighted manhours devoted to current production. Thus if output is a function of total capital K and effective labor Ne is F(K,Ne), the hourly wage of a worker at skill h is Fn(K,Ne)h and his total earnings are Fn(K,Ne)hu(h).
It's perfectly readable if you have a math or econ background, but since economics is about human actions, the human context is important too. So while you do get some discussion of non-convexities and hyperplanes and other mathematical objects of interest, Warsh presents the slow accretion of various ideas into endogenous growth theory via the stories of the economists themselves trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. It might seem faintly condescending to praise economists for being able to turn statements like "knowledge is important for economic growth", "when one person has an idea it doesn't take away from anyone else", or "you can sell more things when there are more people" into equations, like so many toddlers stacking brightly colored blocks into towers, but again: economics is full of deeply counterintuitive ideas, and things that make sense at one level often need to be refined or modified at another level. Building a model that captures enough about the real world to be insightful, yet simple enough to be tractable, is really hard, especially when you're also trying to explain why lasting growth occurs in some places but not others, and the reduction of such a broad concept as "innovation" into a system of equations necessarily involves a short-term loss of subtlety in exchange for longer-term power and insight. It's one thing to theorize that cities grow based on industrial concentration, intense competition, or economic diversity, it's another to use real data and formal models as Ed Glaeser did, to see which theories actually hold up.
This is where Paul Romer's two papers come in: 1986's "Increasing Returns and Long Run Growth", and 1990's "Endogenous Technological Change". "Increasing Returns" integrates knowledge into a model of economic growth, focusing on the positive externalities of new ideas, the increasing returns to the production of goods, and the decreasing returns to scientific research. Whereas previous models had lacked a way to account for creativity, implicitly assuming that innovation happens "outside" the economy, Romer was able to show how firms innovate, how those innovations can leave a market in equilibrium while society overall experiences growth, and how strategic interventions by the government can move markets from low equilibria to higher ones through the strategic strategic diffusion of knowledge (for example, via anti-trust actions against monopolies, public funding for research, or liberalizing adjustments to copyright laws). "Endogenous Technological Change" relates knowledge to growth slightly differently, crediting knowledge accumulation for capital accumulation and productivity growth, formalizing how market forces encourage technological change (though with the important caveat that much "pure research" is insulated from direct market forces, as at universities), and better defining the non-rivalrous and incompletely excludable nature of how innovations can be shared at zero marginal cost. These are important clarifications, because as societies accumulate more knowledge and human capital, forces which apply less or differently to traditional physical capital, like network effects, public goods, indivisibilities, and property rights, become much more important. Public policy becomes vital to ensuring that the simple ingredients of capital, labor, human capital, and the level of technological progress are combined in a way that allows for competitive markets and stable growth.
A vivid example of this comes from Romer's own career, when he provided expert testimony during the infamous Microsoft monopoly trials of the 1990s. The history of the internet is a case study in knowledge spillovers, increasing returns, and literal network effects, and Microsoft's attempts to maintain its dominance in crucial junctures of the industry, modeled as "monopolistic competition", demonstrate the incentives produced by particular attitudes towards intellectual property rights in a world of free reproduction of software. These philosophical differences between the proprietary model and open source model were famously pondered over in essays like "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" and "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", but from a practical perspective, the court system was attempting to decide whether a judicious intervention into the market would diffuse this non-rival knowledge and hence improve economic growth, or whether Microsoft's strategy of using its trade secrets and large scale to dominate the market were all in the game and hence just another example of a successful firm. The decision to break up the company was never implemented, but amusingly enough, in 2005 Microsoft reorganized itself into functional divisions that closely resembled the antitrust experts and the judge's recommendation of how to break up the company AT&T-style.
Much of the book is devoted to Paul Romer's life story, which is interesting if you pay attention to the econ blogosphere or have some familiarity with the field since many prominent names appear at key junctures. His work on the pricing of so-called "club goods" like ski-lift tickets or Disneyland passes, where he accidentally retread the same ground as James Buchanan, is a funny demonstration of how difficult it can be for knowledge to stick within a profession. His attempts to break into the textbook market, and his founding of a company specializing in online test administration, show how rare it is for academic economists to have practical business experience, how that affects their research, and how there might still be room for innovation in the ancient world of teaching.
William Nordhaus, who shared the other half of the 2018 Economics Nobel, gets a brief discussion of his 1993 paper "Do Real Income and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not", which is a fascinating attempt to track the true price of light throughout human history. Based on his estimates, the shifts in energy sources from wood to coal to oil and so on from prehistory to the present has brought the price of light, measured in the number of labor-hours required to produce an hour of light, from 40 man-hours per lumen-hour in 2000 BC to .0001 man-hours per lumen-hour in 2000 AD, which represents a hundreds of thousands-fold drop in costs. This works as both a great critique of attempts to measure price inflation and a practical, objective measure of technological progress at the same time.
I wish there had been more discussion of Nordhaus' research in environmental economics, but a single book can only cover so many things, and as the book itself shows, a loss of specialization would mean a loss in total consumer satisfaction. Warsh produced an excellent account of how knowledge is actually accumulated.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Book Review: Jo Walton - Necessity
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Book Review: Jo Walton - The Philosopher Kings
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