Steve Reads

Admittedly at fourth hand by the time it reaches George Packer, he warns us to be on the lookout for a full-court press on war with Iran, starting the week after Labor Day. Worth mentioning here, just in case. I include Packer’s post below.

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Did anyone else know that there’s craziness going on in Belgium? I did not. Man, I try not to be ignorant, I swear  . . . 

(Post included below.)

My knowledge of Belgium is that it’s that country which, every few years, goes, “Oh fuck, Germans” or “Oh fuck, the French” then sits down with a pile of waffles and waits for the tanks to pass.

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From the moment I picked up this book, basically, I couldn’t put it down. That may be, in part, because I spent the final two hours laying on my left side so that eardrops could work their way into my right ear and extinguish the really merciless ear infection I’ve had, which has even made eating agonizing. (The jawbone’s connected to the eustachian bone.)

That aside, it’s really a great story, and I couldn’t put it down because it had me hooked. Our hero, Henry, has a genetic quirk whereby he can’t avoid jumping around in time. One minute he’s in his house, cup of coffee in hand, wife at his side; the next, there’s a pile of clothes where the Henry used to be, and meanwhile the now-naked Henry has landed somewhere in his own past (or, very occasionally, his future). In that earlier world, the first challenge is always to find clothing, in pursuit of which Henry develops great skill at lockpicking. People aren’t always excited to see naked men strolling about, so Henry learns to run fast. He’s constantly getting dragged down to police stations and disappearing from them, only to reappear next to his wife in the ‘present’, naked once again in the new old world.

40-something Henry visits Clare, his wife, back when she’s only a six-year-old, and tells her that they are destined to be married. He’s continually jumping back to visit her as the years go by, until he takes a 2-year break and waits for the couple to meet naturally. They do, when Henry is 28 and Clare is 20. By now Clare, of course, has met Henry many times, is in love with him, and knows that they’ll one day be married. 28-year-old Henry doesn’t know this yet: that Henry hasn’t met Clare; only Older Henry has.

If it sounds confusing, it’s because I’m not nearly as good a writer as Audrey Niffenegger is. What could be a confusing plot device is never so. She skirts around the Standard Time-Machine Conundrum — namely all the stuff about going back and changing the past, which changes the future — through a little trick that may be hokey but which gets the job done and leaves Niffenegger’s talents free for other, better things.

The story does falter a bit once it’s exhausted most of the fun metaphysical time-travel stuff. What’s left are a few people living their lives while their friend finds himself naked in various times and places, occasionally getting beaten up. There are more than a few scenes of the bourgeoisie listening to opera (Henry’s parents are musicians) and cooking delicate meals. There are pages upon pages of Clare making paper. The latter would seem random if they hadn’t included Niffenegger’s credentials at the start of the book: she teaches classes on the craft of bookmaking at Columbia College Chicago. More than a little of Time Traveler’s Wife, one senses, is an autobiography of Niffenegger, which is offputting: I think I know more about her taste for oral sex than I wanted.

Little things aside, this is the sort of book you can’t put down. It made me cry. I was sad when it was over.

This move to toss out Maliki and replace him with Allawi pretty well gives the lie to the idea that Iraq is a democracy, right? I mean, can’t we just admit now that it’s a U.S. colony, and that its leadership exists at our discretion?

I wish I could write informative, punchy, clearheaded stuff as consistently as Paul Krugman does. Today’s piece on the Republican taste for racism is the latest example. I include it below the fold.

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Bless his heart, but while Stephen Toulmin has some excellent, illuminating ideas, he cannot write well. If you were considering entering the Russellian-logical positivist-Popperian-Kuhnian debate with Toulmin, I would advise against it. Start with someone who’s a better writer. Russell won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, while not his most systematic work of philosophy, is terrifically well written and applies Popper’s ideas on falsifiability to social problems.

That said, the ideas in Toulmin are solid. Like a lot of philosophers and economists I’ve read, he desperately wants a philosophy of science that’s more supple and human than Popper and Kuhn would give him. He wants to define “rationality” in a more flexible way, without any notion that he’s latched onto The One True Notion of Rationality. Before explaining Toulmin’s view of rationality, it might be well to mention a few others:

• Maximizing subjective expected utility, the classical 20th-century economists’ idea. This is closely tied in with Bayesian rationality, and indeed Jimmie Savage’s earliest papers at the University of Chicago were with Milton Friedman. Both try to extend classical logic to human belief. While someone who is logically coherent has beliefs that are not self-contradictory, a Bayesian’s beliefs all comply with the laws of probability: if he claims that one event has probability 1, he is forced to claim that everything other than that event has probability 0; the other laws of probability are similar. If your beliefs were to violate the laws of probability, as reflected in the bets you took, you would be certain to lose.
• Maximizing long-term utility while not necessarily maximizing utility at every minute of one’s life. Robert Frank is my man here.
• The more falsifiable a model is, the more scientific it is (and hence, though he may never actually say it, the more rational). This is Karl Popper’s idea. It’s maybe worthwhile to note here that Popper operationalized Occam’s Razor with this trick: simpler models (i.e., those with fewer parameters) are more falsifiable.
• In general, changing your means to attain whatever you’re aiming at. One has to quote William James’s Principles of Psychology, page 6 here, and I do below the fold.

Of these, Toulmin’s view is closest to the last. Philosophers, he says, have been infected by Plato with the Disease of Mathematics — namely, the urge to make everything into a big, coherent, logically pretty, elegant system. He calls this the curse of “systematicity.” Systematicity only makes sense, he says, if concepts are fixed for all time, and our notions of what constitutes (say) energy will never change. This may well be true of certain branches of physics where the only work left to do is to axiomatize and polish. Those branches of physics have locked themselves out of all future change; as a discipline, they may as well be a branch of mathematics. Their claims are nearly true by definition.

For the rest of our beliefs, we’re not nearly so lucky. Concepts change, humans change, societies change, and any belief system should only be measured by how resistant or pliant it is to change. But Toulmin won’t let us talk abstractly about “belief systems” — at least, he won’t stop it there. If we want to understand why a science is rational, we have to first understand that science is practiced by institutions, not by individual men. This makes it substantially more interesting to talk about science’s collective rationality. (Toulmin deferred discussions of individual rationality to a later book.) What makes an institution (any institution, really, but Toulmin focuses on scientific disciplines as the most rigorous institutions known to us) rational? There’s a litany of things that we might ask for from a rational scientific institution. The shortest to explain is simply that the institution not be too conservative: that it not kill good ideas. What might make an institution kill a good idea? Certainly people whose jobs depend on an earlier model of the world are likely to cause institutional inertia. And what would keep those people in those jobs?

And so on. Toulmin’s job is to make explicit all of these latent sources of irrationality in any organization. (And incidentally, the same sort of analysis could be a delightful balm for all those who believe that corporations are some sort of Magic Machines of Rationality and Efficiency.)

Toward the end, Toulmin faces possibly the biggest challenge: explaining how it’s possible that, in the midst of so much change, there could possibly be biological invariants in the human mind. How could it be possible, for instance, that all humans possess a grammatical deep structure, which is identical among all humans, of which our everyday languages are just the instantiation? If all is change, and rationality consists in remaining supple in the face of change, then how could humans have such invariants?

In a slow, plodding, uninteresting way that could have taken maybe three pages, but which Toulmin extends into 20 or 30, he explains that there are only a few logically tenable ways of modeling the deep structures. Either they have never evolved since the “language organ” first appeared in man, or they evolved slowly (like everything else), or they evolved in one big jump. Biologists reject saltations like that last possibility, so adhering simultaneously to a saltationary deep structure and modern biology would require big changes in the one or the other. As for the other possibilities, Chomsky rejects the notion that language could have evolved, using what sounds like another argument from irreducible complexity (an idea which is, not to put too fine a point on it, bogus).

So the only other option, if you believe that there is a biological basis to language, is to accept that language evolved like any other biological structure — slowly, with variation and selection over millions of years. All is still change, says Toulmin; the theory stands unmoved.

He attacks other such cultural and biological invariants in the same way. They’re interesting, only if you have the power to slam through the verbosity. On alternating Thursdays, I do.

Overall, Toulmin fits into a large body of literature that humanizes the exact sciences. In the same vein, I’d recommend Frank’s book; Gigerenzer, Todd, et al.’s Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, Sam Bowles’s microeconomics textbook, Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions and maybe a few others. It may go without saying that these are all Cosma recommendations, as was the Toulmin book. Thanks, Cosma.

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Crooked Timber today has a post today making some nice connections between international law and what “self-interest” means: a self-interested nation may, indeed, wish to give up some freedom of action. The point that Robert Frank made in Passions Within Reason is that “self-interest,” properly construed, doesn’t mean that you’ll act self-interestedly at every moment: people need to know, at times, that you’re “credibly committed” to an action that’s against your narrow self-interest. Marriage is maybe the most straightforward example: a potential spouse who knew that you acted at every moment out of vulgar self-interest would likely expect to be dumped as soon as someone better came along. Your spouse has to know that you won’t act this way, or else you won’t maximize your (broader-sense) self-interest. Hence self-interest often requires sacrificing vulgar self-interest. The extension to international law is straightforward and sensible.

(CT post included below.)

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On Cosma’s recommendation, I’ve been reading Stephen Toulmin’s book Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. It fits pretty neatly into the philosophical thread running from at least Bertrand Russell onward. To recapitulate them in a quick sentence or two: Russell argued in “On Denoting” that many philosophical problems would disappear if people were just more careful with their language. The logical positivists went kind of crazy with this idea and claimed that all knowledge is either logic or empirical data. They argued a lot with Karl Popper, who claimed that a proposition is scientific in proportion to how “falsifiable” it is — i.e., how easy it would be, in principle, to gather data that prove the hypothesis false, if in fact it is false. It’s easy to find data in favor of a hypothesis: ask any Marxist or Freudian to look at the world, Popper said, and they’d claim that everything around them was proof that their dogma was true. What’s hard is to explain how your philosophy could possibly be proven false.

Lots of people came around and poked holes in Popper’s argument. The biggest might be the “auxiliary hypothesis” objection, namely that a proposition can never be falsified on its own. A proposition rests on a network of other propositions; if it turns out that your proposition is false, it may be false because one of the propositions that it depends on is false. A number of people — Quine maybe chief among them — noted that the more deeply rooted a proposition is, the less likely we are to reject it: the laws of logic, for instance, may be forever beyond falsification.

Then there was Thomas Kuhn. He argued that science exists in two stages: “revolution” and “ordinary science.” Most science, most of the time, is people tinkering at the edges of what they think they know. They’re adjusting the equations to get the sixth decimal point of accuracy; they’re answering abstruse detail questions; and in general they’re operating within the accepted standards of the discipline. Eventually, though, the discipline encounters a problem that cannot be addressed with the accepted methods. It encounters internal strains and cannot accommodate them, a cataclysm ensues, the old paradigm is overthrown, and we’re in a revolution. Things eventually settle down and we’re in normal science, now operating within the new paradigm. And so it continues.

Lots of people have poked holes in Kuhn. When it gets down to details, he just doesn’t seem to have it right. For one thing, he claims that people across a paradigm shift cannot understand one another: the conceptual understanding of the world embodied in Einstein’s physics, for instance, is altogether different from that in Newtonian physics. Kuhn would say that when Newtonians and relativists try to talk with one another, they are just incapable of communicating. As Toulmin points out, though, this clearly isn’t right: paradigm shifts happen over years and decades, and the scientists involved argue passionately with each other throughout. If they can’t speak to one another, they’re sure faking it well.

I also can’t help but note here that Kuhn’s argument is nicely self-swallowing. If physics — the most well-respected, rigorous, tested, mathematical, elegant body of knowledge we have — isn’t converging toward the truth, then what can we say about the humanities? What, more specifically, can we say about the philosophy of science? And what can we say about Thomas Kuhn? I’ll wait for the next paradigm shift in the philosophy of science before I commit myself to any one model.

On my read of these things, the latest move in the game has been the one embodied by Philip Kitcher and Stephen Toulmin. The only natural next step to take, it seems to me, is to look at how science actually works. So we need to ask a host of questions about how scientists think, the jealousies they feel, the structure of academic science and publishing, what counts as an interesting problem at any given moment, how a scientist’s intellectual ancestry affects him now, and so on.

A scientist’s preconceptions about what makes a problem interesting will determine the kind of questions he asks. This will, of course, be true in any field: no one approaches the world as a newborn baby. It will also be true of philosophers of science, of course. So the importance of people like Kuhn, Kitcher and Toulmin, it seems to me, is that they let us ask questions we might not have thought to ask before. When we imagine scientists as infallible truth-generating machines, it hardly matters which personalities are sitting inside those machines. When we situate them, instead, in real human bodies with real human failings, the philosophy of science turns into a sub-branch of sociology or psychology. It becomes another branch of science, with hypotheses about people that can actually be tested or rejected like any other scientific hypothesis.

From what I can tell, this is also what’s happened in economics over the last thirty years. We’ve jettisoned the idea that humans are infallibly rational, and can “solve NP-complete problems in a single bound”. They feel guilt and shame and envy and jealousy and sloth, and they sometimes even do things that they know are wrong. The models might get more complicated, but they’re likely to match up more closely with the real world. A lot seems to ride on understanding psychology. Kitcher incorporated psychology into his book by trying to model within his equations a scientist’s desire for recognition. That’s not an absurd thing to model: the desire for recognition may well drive the scientist to work harder and may cause him to undercut his competitors; in so doing, he may well weaken the institution of science as a whole. By weakening that institution, he may make it harder for the institution to reach the truth. If you’re trying to explain how science could be filled with fallible humans and yet still advance toward truth [], this is an important thing to include in your equations.

[] — You could object here that “advancing to truth” doesn’t make much coherent sense, because in order to know that you’re advancing toward truth, you have to know what the truth is — which, by hypothesis, you don’t. It’s not hard to rescue this: instead of saying that a theory T₂ is an advance toward truth over T₁, you can just say that T₂ provides more accurate explanations of the same phenomena than T₁, explains phenomena that T₁ can’t explain, and doesn’t leave uncovered any areas that T₁ explains well. More succinctly: the set of things that T₂ explains is a strict superset of what T₁ explains.

Facebook hit critical mass maybe a year ago with the under-25 set, and now it appears to have worked its way up to people in my group (are we a “generation”? Maybe the “didn’t-always-have-the-Internet generation”?). I’ve now received a number of Facebook requests, and it looks like a good fraction of the people I know are on it.

Can someone explain to me what makes Facebook better than Friendster? It’s more open-ended, I guess. What else is the big deal?

Unless someone gives me a very persuasive defense of its awesomeness, I’m going to deactivate my account again. I’ve deactivated it once already, but for some reason I brought it back. I’ve been deliberately removing distractions from my life for the past six months, and I’m still highly distractable; the last thing I need is another social network.

If I’ve not already ranted about it, it will be necessary at some point soon to rant on here about the silliness of “social networks” as a product rather than as a process. Social networks are what the Internet is; making separate walled gardens that capture some part of this social-networkiness just delays what the Net ought to become.

Another report from the bus to Vermont: I don’t really understand people who would read Cosmo when on a long trip. In fact, rather than enter my favorite books into a service like Friendster, I suspect I could find a good literary match for myself by just listing “wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book or magazine designed for stupid people” there.

In general I don’t get people who use various media as distraction — like turning on a TV and just zoning out at the end of a long day. I really don’t get that.

Suppose that someday — I don’t imagine it’ll be too far in the future — Google Maps and GPSes hook up in the following way: everyone has a GPS in his car, and also has a mobile device running Google Maps. Google Maps will keep track of the speed on a given portion of highway, if its GPS-equipped users allow it to track that data. Given this data, Google Maps can provide highly accurate, moment-by-moment time estimates to get from point A to point B. It can dynamically change the route it recommends, based on the latest road conditions. Right now, for instance, I’m on a bus to Vermont (using a Verizon PC5750 card courtesy of my employer), and the bus driver has reported that it would take two hours and ten minutes to get from Boston to the New Hampshire border on I-93 (versus an hour or so in normal traffic); “I’m not even gonna try that route,” he says, and instead he’s taking I-90 to I-95 to I-89. A network of GPS- and Google Maps-equipped cars could perform this kind of dynamic route planning automatically (and probably do it better than the driver).

It seems to me that there’d be a wrinkle in this scenario, however. Suppose lots of people were using this Google Maps system. Google notices that traffic on I-93 is abysmal, so it tells a large number of cars to take I-95 instead. Now I-95 will be swamped. So Google will direct the next mass of cars to I-93. And so on.

Google could try to plan ahead, based on previous experience. It may know, for instance, that it will have (say) 10,000 users taking the Boston-to-New Hampshire route every night. With enough data, it would be able to estimate the average traffic speed on each possible route as a function of the number of cars sent on that route. So when choosing how many of those 10,000 users to send down each road, it would have to estimate the speed that it would then be imposing on that road.

Some element of planning ahead and estimation seems essential in this scenario. Are there good algorithms to solve this problem?

Surely the best things you will see on the web this month are Hans Rosling’s talks from TED: his talk from 2006 proving that talking about the ‘developed world’ and the ‘developing world’ makes no sense, and his 2007 talk on how to help global poverty. Both are about 20 minutes long. Many thanks to my friend Sarah Benis-Scheier-Dolberg for pointing me to these.

I would strongly recommend going and watching Flight of the Conchords perform “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros”. It will make you laugh until you die. (4:21 YouTube video.) I’ve also cached the 11-meg .flv file.

While you’re at it, give their song “Business Time” a listen. I’ve known about them since Matthew Baldwin linked to it, and sadly that’s just about all that I know by them. I hear they now have a show on HBO. Has anyone seen it? Is it very excellent? Tell me that it is very excellent.

(Thanks to my man Josh Wretzel for “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros”.)

As far as I can tell from A Peace To End All Peace, the big plan to remake the Middle East after World War I and grant peaceful coexistence to the many varied religions living there was as follows: don’t plan to remake the Middle East after World War I and grant peaceful coexistence to the many varied religions living there.

All of Fromkin’s book, basically, takes place from the perspective of the French, Russian, and British cabinets, which is either happenstance based on which historical documents were available, or a sustained joke: it takes place in those cabinets because the Middle Easterners themselves had no real role in shaping their own future. Not only did a few Europeans sit down one day and draw lines on a map that they didn’t really understand, but they managed to pollute even that level of ignorance with political infighting and diplomatic conspiracy: the British wanted to harm the French, the Soviets (after the 1917 revolution) wanted to strike a blow against British empire, the British wanted to protect their route to India by controlling Afghanistan and Syria, and a hundred other allegiances besides. Only very occasionally did anyone have the vaguest connection with actual Middle Easterners.

Among other major mistakes made by the Western powers, a few stand out:

1. Treating ‘Arabs’ or even ‘Muslims’ as homogeneous groups when in fact there were dozens of sects and families that mutually mistrusted one another. (Imagine installing a Catholic president in the United States and expecting that Lutherans, say, would go along with his rule. See also “Popery”.)
2. Deciding to back Hussein and his children, making his son Faisal king of Iraq and Abudllah emir of Transjordan (now Jordan). The British assumed that Hussein had hundreds of thousands of rabid followers, when as it happens he had only a few thousand.
3. Assuming that the Syrians would prefer to cast off the French yoke and put on the British one, rather than desiring a nation of their own. When the Western powers encountered resistance to their rule, they seemed confused about why this was happening.
4. Bargaining over the destiny of the Middle East without really paying attention to what Middle Easterners wanted. See, in particular, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, whereby the British and French secretly agreed on the fate of Syria. The British, at least, seemed convinced that ‘public opinion,’ in the Western sense, didn’t make any sense in the Middle East, but Fromkin never really explains what they meant.
5. Assuming that a Western government — checks and balances, centralized administration and so forth — made sense in a region that had long been held together tenuously under Ottoman-style administration. (Fromkin’s one- or two-page explanation of the Ottoman background is funny and illuminating. I would have liked more pre-history.)
6. Maybe most humorously, if it weren’t so tragic and outdated: assuming that Jews were the secret motive force behind everything happening in the world. The Balfour declaration, offering British support for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, was originally conceived to help the British win World War I: give the all-powerful Jews something, and they’ll get on your side and help defeat the Germans (whom the Jews, by supposition, controlled). Somehow this existed cheek by jowl with rabid anti-Semitism in official Britain, and alongside knowledge of the pogroms that the Jews were trying to escape in Russia. How the British managed to square this particular circle would be a fascinating book on its own.

Charging guns blazing into the Middle East, the British decided to topple the Ottoman Empire rather than prop it up as a block against the Russians — as they had been doing for at least a century. (Interesting Statistics Department: Fromkin reports that the Russian Empire had been growing at a rate of 50 square miles per day for 400 years.) With World War I plodding along, and the combatants realizing early on that they would gain no territory within Europe, they decided that they had to expand their empires elsewhere. So they set about on the purely bureaucratic job of carving up the Middle East without understanding what they were getting into. So they created a power vacuum, which the locals very quickly filled with their own brand of rule that matched up not at all with what the West had in mind.

Analogies to the present day are, of course, illusory.

Whilst in the UK, I finished reading Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. I submit that it is impossible to finish that book without really viscerally despising Moses. Partly out of a desire to leave no hole in his argument unfilled, and partly because he has trouble using one word when forty-five words will do, the book is just really, really long — nearly 1,200 pages. I wanted to get angry at Caro for doing this; every time I considered getting angry at him, though, the next sentence would be some devastating quote from one of Moses’ victims. The book could still stand some editing, but it’s certainly the quickest, most engrossing 1,200-page read I’ve ever had.

It’s far more than just a biography of Moses. It’s a study of how power actually works — how, specifically, dictators amass power, and how even ostensibly democratic systems can evade public scrutiny. For at least 30 years, according to Caro, Moses was utterly beyond democratic control. Anyone who wanted to get anything done in New York City needed Moses’ money, and needed the engineering expertise that he monopolized. Anyone from the City’s government who wanted to talk with the federal highway or public-housing authorities had to talk to Moses, who would relay (his version of) their words to the feds. No one could fire him without bringing down an endless public outcry — an outcry encouraged and protected by the media, which Moses expertly manipulated into printing only what he wanted said and only the statistics that his office generated. Money and media were in his pocket; with those, he was invincible. A purely accidental slipup after 40 years in power led to a crack in the godlike image that the media had sculpted for him. That crack led the media to question one small corner of his power. Having surrounded himself by yes-men, Moses flew in a rage against any such questioning. But you don’t pick a fight with the media. (The phrase one always quotes here is something like “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”) That rage led to still more questioning, which led to still more rages, and by the time it was through his media armor was gone. Down fell the rest of his protection.

That, in the tiniest conceivable nutshell, is the story of Moses’ power and its end. The Power Broker is an in-depth study of the processes that made all of this possible. The argument is watertight, as far as I can tell.

My big lingering question from Caro’s book is whether any amount of legal tinkering could possibly have saved democracy from Moses. The people with the money will probably always own the political process in this country, whether they buy the politicians outright or do it in more stealthy ways. Much of The Power Broker explains the “honest graft” that powered the Moses machine: payoffs to lawyers hidden as fees, payoffs to insurance companies hidden as premiums, payoffs to banks in the form of interest-free loans, and payoffs to unions in the form of contract favoritism. When Moses “pushed a button,” everyone on his side — which is to say, the lawyers, and insurance companies, and banks, and unions — would call anyone whom Moses wanted them to call and state in no uncertain terms that the recipient’s political career would end unless he did Moses’ bidding. No politician could withstand this kind of constant pressure. Moses had to engineer some remarkably clever legislation and get it pushed through without anyone noticing the details, so if anything he’s a worst-case example  . . .  but that’s just the point: you want to look at how the system (in this case representative democracy) works when something fails.

Apart from Moses-hatred, two big themes come out of the book. First, I will probably never read a newspaper the same way again. If we believe Caro, the media’s coverage of anything related to Moses bore no relation to reality — both because Moses wined them and dined them, and because they seem just incapable of reporting political backstories. And all the people who actually wield the power are far too clever to pull the lever themselves. The real power in New York, says Caro, is in places like the Chase Manhattan Bank, but the press never bothers to report from there. And the press is much more attuned to clear-cut scandal — actual bribes, say — than it is to honest graft. For 30 years, no one had the slightest clue what Moses was doing, even when what he was doing involved condeming the homes of tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers.

The Power Broker’s other big theme is that the private automobile is an absolute disaster for American cities. It doesn’t even make mathematical sense to build roads to the exclusion of public transit when you’re trying to address traffic congestion: train tracks can accommodate an order of magnitude more passengers than can highways. And train tracks encourage higher-density development, by encouraging people to walk to their trains. That higher-density development means people can own fewer cars. Conversely, if lots of people own cars, the whole pattern of development centers on cars — which is where strip malls and highway ugliness come from.

That second point illustrates the silliness of one common line of American thought. When an ugly patch of road forms that’s lined with nothing but strip malls and McDonald’s, we’re inclined to say, “It must have happened because people wanted it to.” But what “people want” is defined by the choices available to them. If someone lives in most American suburbs, he can’t “choose” to walk to work. That choice is not available to him. He can’t choose to walk to a movie theatre. He is forced, in fact, to “choose” to own a car. He then chooses, like tens of thousands of his fellow-Americans, to sit in the same traffic jam on the same highway. This isn’t choice: this is path dependence, enforced by the roads that we’ve built. Had the government chosen to invest in subways and high-speed rail, the set of choices and costs would be different. But it doesn’t even make sense to talk about a choice that’s unencumbered by prior decisions or by institutions: the institutions define the set of available choices, and then those choices force future choices of institutions.

The big trouble with a public work like a bridge or a highway is that if society decides in the future that it wants to pursue another path — say, subways — that option is pretty decisively foreclosed. Caro illustrates this point with Long Island: it would have been cheap to have bought a 20-foot right of way for high-speed rail while condemning land for highways on the Island. Once that highway went down, though, the value of the land immediately shot up. It shot up even more when houses starting popping up there. Nowadays, even getting started on laying down track for a high-speed rail would involve tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of dollars in condemnation fees alone. Our earlier choices, in a very direct way, made later choices difficult if not impossible.

So it’s hard, I think, to escape The Power Broker without really and truly despising the automobile. It’s been a disaster for American cities, a disaster for America’s rural areas, and of course a disaster for American foreign policy. Robert Moses may have done more than any one man to unite the evils of the automobile with the evils of undemocratic public planning.

P.S.: For sheer misstatement of what The Power Broker is about, it would be hard to do better than the New York Times’s ‘balanced’ coverage of Caro’s modern opponents. This is rather funny, considering that The Power Broker levels its biggest guns against the Times’s role in whitewashing Moses’ achievements. Plus ça change . . . 

I installed Gallery2 at Adam Rosi-Kessel’s suggestion, as an open-source, decentralized alternative to Flickr. (Though don’t get me wrong: Flickr rocks.) It’s a great tool. My first photo album is in there: photos from London, Edinburgh, and Inverness. I really really hate most every photo of me in there, but there are lots of good photos of The Babe.

Some notes on installing Gallery:

1. Install every plugin, but then disable all the ones you won’t need. They eat up memory.
2. Disable all the “Graphics Toolkits” plugins except ImageMagick. They conflict oddly with one another and make generating thumbnails difficult or impossible.
3. Installation in general is incredibly smooth. It’s certainly the best open-source installer I’ve yet seen; WordPress’s installer, though excellent, could get some joy from Gallery’s.

I feel like I had other notes, but that’ll do for now.

1. London is, of course, great. I’ve never been, though, so I probably spent more time than is advisable at the British Museum, Trafalgar Square, etc.
2. Edinburgh is the best ever. We were there just at the beginning of the International Festival and the Fringe Festival, so we missed most of the awesomeness, but still it was amazing. Everyone should go.
3. Inverness is not worth going to. I think I can smell a decaying city with some “revitalization” Lysol sprayed atop, and Inverness reeked. Though I had one of the best meals of my life at Café One in Inverness — for something like 1/7 the cost of a meal at L’Espalier in Boston — so it wasn’t a total loss.
4. Haggis is great. Seriously. And you can get it at every restaurant. Other than how it’s made, I can’t imagine why it has such a bad reputation. But its ingredients — a sheep stomach filled with oats or meat — are no worse than that of a hot dog or sausage. It’s delicious.
5. Gas is $7 a gallon or so.
6. Everyone who drives a car drives a small car.
7. The London Tube goes everywhere.
8. Cities in the UK seem to follow a pattern: super-dense development, then farmland or green space within a remarkably short distance of the city center. This is right and good, and is how it should be. It illustrates that dense city development is actually better for the environment than suburbs that require the land to be scarred with roads.
9. Bless their hearts, but British women are just not at all attractive. I’m very sorry, but this is a fact.
10. Walking 18 miles from Inverness to Drumnadrochit in 7.5 hours is not a good idea. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that it is.
11. The British pound-to-U.S. dollar exchange rate sucks.
12. I knew the Brits drank tea, but I didn’t realize that they would be incapable of making espresso. Monmouth Coffee in London is the only place I found that made an acceptable cappuccino. (Thanks, as always for such things, to CoffeeGeek for the recommendation. It’s indicative that no one on CoffeeGeek could recommend espresso in Edinburgh or Inverness.)

That’s all for now.