Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

It’s surely been said a million times, and I myself have probably said it on here a bunch, but it bears repeating: Leo Tolstoy was paying far more attention to the world around him than anyone else was or is. His books — the 1.07 of them that I’ve read so far — are monuments of detail. I imagine him attending a cocktail party, growing endlessly bored, and instead taking mental notes about every last facial tic, nervous hand gesture, and flat smile that he encounters. War and Peace promises the same joys as Anna Karenina in this respect.

The introduction suggests that the Communists considered banning War and Peace, on the grounds that it was too bourgeois. My initial impression is that Tolstoy intended all of his scenes of bored royalty to be ironic. He’s raising his eyebrow at the entire culture of which he’s a part. Thus far, anyway, he’s a subtler Flaubert. (Speaking of which: I’m told I need to read A Sentimental Education. I should probably also read “The Hedgehog and the Fox”.)

So I’m excited. Tolstoy may write long books, but they’re not difficult. Tolstoy overjoys me with his powers of social observation. He’s a remarkable psychologist.

I installed Rockbox for the Video iPod the other day. It’s really quite easy. It actually leaves the regular iPod firmware on the device, so that you can boot back into the Apple interface whenever the urge strikes you; technically it’s changing the Apple bootloader and adding a second parallel bit of firmware. To reboot into the regular iPod, press Select and Menu at the same time to reboot, then flip the top-left switch into lock when the iPod goes black.

From my perspective, two things about Rockbox were huge wins. First, I got to play my Ogg Vorbis files; I have about 30,000 of them, so the prospect of re-ripping all of them (where that’s even possible) or converting them all from one lossy codec to another was displeasing. Adam reminded me of the unwisdom of converting.

Secondly, I get to treat the iPod more like an external hard drive with the thinnest veneer of software on top. I can copy MP3s/Oggs/FLACs to the iPod using any tool I want; I don’t need to use Apple’s API to copy files into that weird directory structure. Rockbox’s software constructs a catalog of whatever music files happen to be on disk; it doesn’t need the filesystem to create this structure.

The UI could use some help, as is typical with open-source projects. It’s infinitely customizable, as is also typical with open-source projects. Oddly, the default Rockbox theme isn’t exactly like Apple’s default iPod layout. It ought to be. When you have a UI that someone else has dumped countless man-hours into perfecting, you shouldn’t assume that you can do better as a free open-source project.

That said, I’m told the UI is controlled by a text file. I intend to pare down the now-playing UI, which is awfully busy. And I think I’ll suggest that they change the default UI. In fact I’d suggest that they bundle the font pack with the mainline Rockbox code, then change the default font.

My limited exposure to the standard iPod UI suggested that if you wanted to back out of a menu, you’d press the Menu key until you got to the top-level menu. On the Rockbox you use the Previous key. That took me a while to figure out. Another confusing bit is that if you’re in the middle of a song, and you navigate back out to an artist or album page, you expect that you can just press Play on the album or artist you want to play. It’s not so; Play returns you to the now-playing screen. Instead you have to navigate to the first track that you want to play and press Play there. Or something like that (I don’t have the iPod in front of me). It’s confusing. It seems to me that in no circumstances should the Play button return you to now-playing.

Final complaint: the database (aka music catalog) takes a long time to update if you push a lot of data to the device. You need to enable Auto-Update (Settings → General Settings → Database Settings), and possibly a couple other settings, to make the database refresh when you’d expect it to.

The Apple firmware never really turns the device off; I guess it just hibernates it. Rockbox does turn it off, so if you leave it idle for a while you’ll need to give it a few seconds to wake up. I guess Rockbox hasn’t caught up to whatever power-saving technology Apple uses; I’ve seen complaints here and there about battery life.

That’s about it. For open-source software on proprietary hardware, I’m impressed by Rockbox. It’d made my iPod substantially more valuable to me than it otherwise would have been.

I often float images to the right or left of these blog entries. The XHTML Strict way to do this is to define a class in your CSS called, say, “insetright” that looks like so:

.insetright {
    float: right;
    margin-left: 0.75em;
}

then float the image in the XHTML:

<img src="foo.jpg" alt="Whatever" class="insetright" />

Your pages will then validate as XHTML Strict, which is good for some reason. They will also look nice in most any browser.

The trouble is that they will look crummy in RSS. No RSS aggregator that I know of honors user-specified CSS. There’s no reason why they can’t honor CSS; you can link to stylesheets from XML in a few ways. But no RSS reader pays attention to those links. Every RSS reader, though, does honor the align attribute:

<img src="foo.jpg" alt="Whatever" align="right" />

But align is not a valid XHTML attribute, since it relates to presentation rather than semantics. So if you want XHTML, your blog looks bad in RSS.

Does anyone know of an XHTML-friendly way to format images that works in most RSS readers?

I give this book credit for advancing ideas that maybe a lot of people wouldn’t have thought of before, and for tying together a lot of strands that people might have seen as elements of the different problems. In a word, Hacker brings together much of post-1960 American life under the heading of “risk”: increasingly, our economic fates are being thrown back on the cruelties of the market. Getting sick can cost us tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars; losing our jobs can mean economic devastation. The market thrives on Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”, and it is by common understanding the very hallmark of a dynamic capitalist economy. What it means, though, is that none of us can expect our jobs to be around in 10 years: they may be creatively destroyed just as easily as the next guy’s.

Of course most middle- and upper-income readers will immediately try to defend their own sense of self, by supposing that their own level of education insulates them from the shocks of the new global economy: surely creative destruction is creatively destroying manual laborers’ lives, not ours. Hacker says no, and submits a mountain of data to prove his point: over time, we’re all becoming more subject to economic crises. The standard economic statistics don’t point this out; they focus on economic growth or inequality, but not risk. If Hacker’s book is valuable for nothing else, it is valuable for focusing attention on risk where previously few people did.

To deal with this risk, we need to return to an insurance society. Like a lot of people, Hacker advocates health insurance similar to Medicare. He advocates not only unemployment insurance, but unemployment insurance that helps people transition from a creatively-destroyed career to a new one. Hacker doesn’t have time to build out the argument — actual policy prescriptions are confined to the final 10% or 15% of the book — but he says that the economic profession is broadly agreed on the necessity for this kind of insurance.

The broader social impact of American insecurity often goes unremarked. One of my coworkers made an excellent point about it recently: in Europe, he says, you’ll find far more little shops run by sole proprietors than you will here. He believes this is because there’s a social welfare net that lets you take some risks that you just couldn’t take in this country. Most important among the strands of the safety net, of course, is health insurance: insurance for a small business is frightfully expensive, so presumably a lot of small businessmen go without. It would be interesting to test the connection between bad-sense risk (the chance of economic collapse) and good-sense (entrepreneurial) risk.

The move from pensions to 401(k)s is another big thread in The Great Risk Shift. A large body of research suggests that people are terrible at judging their own long-term prospects. We systematically undersave (for that matter, I systematically undersave), we systematically underestimate the likelihood of a major life catastrophe, and we invest too much money in the company we work for. Pensions used to protect against this, by shifting the burden of risk-estimation onto the employer. Workers didn’t have to figure out where the money went, they had no choice about whether to invest, and their nest egg was more stable as a result. Even making 401(k)s opt-out rather than opt-in makes a huge difference in how much we use them. Forced savings are good for us. Here’s where everyone is obliged to mention Ulysses tying himself to the mast to ward off the allure of the Sirens. He foresaw his own weakness and protected against it. So should we. Government can help.

I think The Great Risk Shift will be mostly valuable in two directions:

1. Helping to guide conversations with non-believers during the health-insurance debate: we’re not just talking about poor people getting sick here. We’re talking about a much broader economic problem that can only be solved by joining forces with our countrymen.

2. The deeper research in the ample footnotes. I’ve found a lot of good stuff in there.

It’s not a very good piece of rhetoric, though. When Hacker talks to Real People, he sounds like an academic rather than a beat reporter. Indeed, if you read the footnotes, it turns out that most of the Real People conversations are from other people’s books. I don’t think Hacker has much power as a polemicist: he’s not going to talk with real people, or appeal to them very much either.

What I’d like is something like Jon Cohn’s Sick: scholarly and yet passionate. (For a taste of Cohn’s style, see his essay “Creative Destruction”). Hacker’s not quite there, but I’m willing to give his earlier Off Center a shot.

My lovely girlfriend is starting to prepare plans for a trip for my 30th birthday in May. She’s not told me where we’re going, but the Middle East seems to be a possibility; I’ve previously expressed interest in visiting Damascus, which is (they say) the oldest continuously inhabited spot on earth. It looks amazing.

So now I’m soliciting information: does anyone here have experience traveling in the Middle East? It may be that I’m completely wrong, and of course I’d like Stephanie to keep the destination a surprise. I’ll gather information about lots of places in the meantime, just in case.

We ought to dispense with one question right away: are there any places where I should be afraid of traveling? I’ve already put Iraq on that list.

Today I became the last person in the United States to own an iPod. Well, not really, but damn: probably 95% of my friends have them. It would have taken me another year, probably, to buy myself one; my parents were kind enough to buy me a nice one.

Adam Rosi-Kessel wants me to install Rockbox. I’ll probably do so in a bit. Right now I’m just feeling my way around the thing. And I’m really enjoying The Sunlandic Twins.

Actually, I don’t know quite what the virtue of iTunes would be if I don’t intend to buy from iTMS — which I don’t; I run nothing but Linux all day and buy from Amazon. And I have forty-some gigs of Ogg Vorbis files. Probably installing RockBox would be the best idea.

The public-health justification for trademark law is pretty clear: if the law defends my product brand at the point of a gun, I have an incentive to strengthen that brand. It’s a defense against fraudsters latching onto my product’s goodwill. For instance, without trademark law, lots of soft-drink brands would have an incentive to pretend that they’re Coca-Cola. The imitators could funnel sewage into cans labeled like Coke’s, make a few thousand (million?) dollars before the world caught on, and abscond with the money. As it is, there’s a whole apparatus of law that would punish the bad guys here: among other things, food laws preventing sewage from being marketed as beverages, and trademark law to punish false branding.

How would this work in an anarcho-capitalist world? For that matter, how would it work in a slightly more palatable night-watchman state? What defense would we have against fraudulent food sales? I presume that Randians elevate the free market here: private enforcement would take care of it. I would spend lots of money to defend the purity of my brand; I’d hire private enforcers to kneecap those who sell Sewage Coke. So the anarcho-capitalist world would abound with private enforcers. But surely in a free market, increasing returns would quickly lead some private enforcers to be more efficient at it than others (e.g., they have much friskier cudgels). They would sell enforcement for less, and would take over a sizable fraction of the market. The lowest-cost enforcer of private brands, armed with guns, is … the government! Either that, or there would be a great many small trademark enforcers, in which case the economic waste would probably be overwhelming. (To be fair about such things, we’d have to do some math.)

In general, a lot of anarcho-capitalism looks like government by another name. Anarcho-capitalists are all about the sanctity of private property, for instance, but who’s defending their property? Property owners try to protect their land on their own; the strongest one wins. So the owners contract out to private security firms. Those security firms have thereby been granted the power of violence over others. (Well, in an anarcho-capitalist world we’ve all been granted the power of violence over one another.) Again, the strongest ones win. And so forth: the Mafia coalesces. Whether you call it a “Mafia” or a “government,” the result is the same.

You could spin out other stories about how the anarcho-capitalist world evolves. In one of them, maybe the fighting stops before anyone’s coalesced into larger protection rackets. Maybe we all sign a binding agreement that we’ll keep off each other’s property. But what makes that agreement binding? There could be a third-party enforcer of the contract, which is … a government! To enforce that contract for a sufficiently large number of parties, the enforcer would have to be more powerful than any of the parties.

Maybe I’m just not imaginative enough, but I don’t see how anarchism would lead to a better world than the one we have now. In fact it seems that it would lead to exactly the world we have now, after a few hundred or thousand years of destructive convulsions.

I have to re-listen to Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech every six or eight months. This is the speech he gave to a joint session of Congress, on the occasion of his introducing the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It is awe-inspiring. Here’s Johnson, before a chamber that Southerners have dominated for a hundred years, who’ve filibustered any attempt to grant rights to black people. They are masters of procedure, able to snarl any racial progress and use the mechanisms of parliament far better than their opponents. And here Johnson stands, face to face with that history. Here he is, spitting the protesters’ “We Shall Overcome” in the face of his former allies. I get a shiver every time I listen to it.

I’ve probably written about this speech before; if so, forgive me.

Reading the first three volumes of Robert Caro’s bio of LBJ gave me a great deal of respect for the man (and for Caro, for that matter). George Packer’s chunk about LBJ from Blood of the Liberals (which you really want to read) sealed the deal:

It wasn’t the two good-looking Boston-born Harvard grads Jack and Bobby Kennedy, but the big-eared vulgarian from the Texas hill country and Southwest Texas Teachers College, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who insisted to Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen: “The Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them. I want to pull out the cannon. The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience  . . .  I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway. The difference is if your President just enforces court decrees the South will feel it’s yielded to force. He ought to make it almost make a bigot out of nearly anybody that’s against him, a high lofty appeal, treat these people as Americans.” And yet Kennedy remained — and remains — the liberals’ darling, while Johnson may never be known for anything but Vietnam.

I’ve cached the “We Shall Overcome” MP3, and the transcript is below.

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I’ve started in on The Great Risk Shift, whose main idea is that the U.S. should move back to the kind of world embodied by the New Deal — an “insurance and opportunity society” where we protect one another from uncontrollable risks. I pay a little more in my health insurance, and you pay a little more in yours, so that our lives aren’t destroyed in the event that one of us gets sick. The Great Risk Shift is starting exceedingly well; it’s a good blend of scholarship and passion. Hacker is upset about the sort of world we’ve come to, but he’s not going to open a hole in his argument to let anyone label him a partisan hack.

It’s an exceptionally well-cited book, so I’ve been reading some of the articles he mentions. First up was Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Moral-Hazard Myth”. It’s a simple five-page argument that using moral hazard as the standard by which we construct health-insurance plans leads to exactly the world we have today: a world where

A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

It’s an excellent article, making the point as well as anyone could: we should stop worrying about moral hazard in the design of our national health-care system.

One of the economists in that article, though, makes me wonder what the actual upper bound on moral-hazard costs per person is:

“Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”

So imagine a society where no one had to pay anything for health coverage, no matter how extensive. On average, how much would we expect each person to pay, above what he’d pay if insurance premia tracked risk?

I do feel some embarrassment at having ever supported premia that increase with risk. That demand seems connected with economic monomania: focus on the single goal of economic efficiency (i.e., maximum profits), then build a system that attains that goal. The resulting system is madness.

Up next are two papers on the economics of health care: Arrow’s “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care” and Pauly’s “The Economics of Moral Hazard: Comment”.

This is a slight little book, overstuffed with philosophy to justify what isn’t an especially difficult point: government forces one man to submit to another’s will. That’s not good. Man must seek self-government in all things. Hence government is necessarily in conflict with human autonomy. Hence Wolff has been driven to philosophical anarchism.

He brings up some fine points, such as the inherent difficulty in democracy: minorities must submit to the will of the majority when they lose a vote on a bill. This is bad; it reduces the autonomy of the minority. We could get around this problem if we only allowed laws to pass when 100% of the electorate supported them, but that doesn’t scale well. Hence we’re stuck with the problem that in any practicable government, one man must submit to another. Wolff ignores the possibility of a government with protections for the minority, but it probably doesn’t harm the main thrust of his point at all: in a nation ruled by a government, people must sometimes do that which they oppose. Which is bad.

Maybe this is arguable, but it seems straightforward enough. If maximal autonomy is your goal, then probably all of Wolff’s conclusions follow. But why should that be the goal? I suspect that we should follow positive economics and compare one existing form of government with other existing forms of government, rather than comparing an extant government to a possible world.

I’ve been having a whole series of arguments with an anarcho-capitalist at work recently. He describes to me what the world would be like without a government. You run down this fantasy track for a while before stopping and realizing that the whole dispute is really worthless. I’d rather not specify principles of government. Or rather, I think I’d prefer my principles to be far higher-level than Wolff’s. My principle is that I’d like to keep poor people from starving. Another principle is that civilized society entails protecting people from events that are beyond their control: a flood shouldn’t destroy your life, the death of a spouse shouldn’t plunge your family into financial ruin, and so forth. These are higher-level principles. Conclusions derived from them, it seems to me, will be closer to the action than principles derived from far deeper principles.

So I have my doubts that philosophical anarchism is really connected with the practical business of creating a world we’d want to live in.

P.S.: If you read Wolff’s preface to the new edition of this book on Amazon’s Search-Inside-the-Book feature, you’ll see that his anarchism comes from the left rather than the right: it started with anxiety over the nuclear-arms race. It’s funny how rarely right-wing libertarians complain about the violence of industrial states; instead they’re on about taxes. You’d think violence would be a more obvious thing to attack.

Attention conservation notice: 1600 words on a really powerful book about the fatal allure of expert planning. “Don’t underestimate the contributions of your fellow-men” might be the big takeaway.

This book is probably best summarized as follows: The most successful systems are those that exploit the knowledge of all their people, rather than assuming that society can be changed from the top. All the knowledge of how the world actually works, and the actual complexity of getting things done, resides in the people who need to do it, rather than in the minds of planners far from the action. Beware of those who believe that the people’s indigenous ways are backwards, pre-scientific and ignorant; in reality, though the people’s methods may not have all the rigor of the latest scientific theories, they are likely to be precisely adapted to all the complexity of the world around them.

But Seeing Like A State is much more than that. It is a thoroughly documented attack on high-modernist thinking. This is the mindset of a Le Corbusier, who comes in for a thorough lashing at Scott’s hands. Le Corbusier and his disciples decided that modern cities were all wrong: their “chaotic” layout must indicate that they were corrupt and unworkable within. Jane Jacobs most famously tore into that fundamental confusion in The Death and Life of Great American Cities : surface chaos actually conceals remarkable underlying purpose and form. Scott takes a lot from Jacobs. Along with the classical anarchists, she seems to be his biggest inspiration.

The high-modernist ideal is at its worst when it’s combined with infinite state power. Combine these two and you get the evils of the former Soviet Union: shift peasants off their plots into “modern” industrial agriculture and force them to adhere to the latest theories of geometric crop planting — theories like monoculture, identically spaced crops … all very geometrical and orderly in the mind of someone who’s not imaginative enough to see past the surface. And this mindset assumes throughout that the people must just be ignorant: they mustn’t want to live in crowded cities; they mustn’t know what they’re doing when they farm their polycultured, “chaotic” crops. When combined with state power, the expert is the designated local god. That way lies ruin.

In a lot of respects, this is not an argument against experts, though it could be misconstrued that way. For one thing, scientific experts really do have a lot to contribute to, say, peasant agronomy, and they really can contribute a lot to improving (say) rural sanitation. The trouble is when a few threads come together:

1. Ignorance of local conditions.
2. Confusing the thing being modeled with the model itself.
3. The desire to make the world look like the laboratory
4. The power to turn items 1 through 3 into reality.

Item 4 is what makes Seeing Like A State into an argument for anarchism. States get most of Scott’s ire, because they do bequeath this power onto dictators. But industry comes in for a spanking, too. In fact chapter 8 of Seeing Like A State is the next logical thing to read after The Omnivore's Dilemma: it explores at a slightly different level the problems with scientific farming as it’s practiced in the United States. Rather than adapt farming to local conditions, American agriculture bends the natural world to its particular model of how farming should be done. This includes monoculture, whose predictable consequence is the rise of pests that are adapted to eat that monocultured crop. The next step in the game, if you’re an American agricultural conglomerate, is to spray loads of pesticides on your fields. Evolution can play the game too, though, so it responds by building pests who are better adapted to those pesticides. And so the arms race continues. And so the soil erodes, the pesticide runoff blackens, and so forth.

The root of that whole war is the assumption that nature should play the game our way, rather than that we should bend to it. In turn, this monomania is a consequence of straight-ahead economic logic that asks what a profit-maximizing firm (farm) would do, then produces an unambiguous answer: maximize output. When cost and output are the only variables, the model is very clear. It’s only clear, of course, if you ignore other things, such as long-term soil degradation. Including these other variables would complicate the model. And, again, if you confuse the model with the thing being modeled, you come to believe that maximizing output is unambiguously and objectively good, rather than being the result of a fixed set of assumptions.

This is a relentlessly powerful and unbelievably sad book: it picks off, one by one, the forces that made the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries look grotesque. It suffers from some verbosity; like Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, though, it always manages to save itself within a few paragraphs of where your patience starts to wear thin. The sections on Russian collectivization, the Tanzanian Ujamaa, Le Corbusier, and the creation of Brasília, in particular, are worth the price of admission on their own. In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant — quite consciously — to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as “science” told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable: starvation in Tanzania and in Russia, and a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.

Rather than go theoretically very deep, Scott insists on painting the details vividly; I assume this was a stylistic choice, in keeping with the theme that all the intelligence in a system is at the “edge of the network.” Don’t write like someone positioned at the center, I imagine Scott saying to himself; write like you’re at the edge. And so he does. This is where a lot of his verbosity comes from.

I have only two wishes for this book:

1. I wish it gave some more criteria by which to judge modern-day schemes organized by experts. As luck would have it, for instance, my roommate pointed me to a video of William McDonough describing his plans for new Chinese cities — McDonough being one of the Cradle to Cradle guys. The Chinese government has asked McDonough to apply cradle-to-cradle principles to city design; it looks like he’s building a number of 400,000-person cities for them. If you watch the video, and you have the “beware experts with unlimited power” principle in mind, you’ll wonder whether McDonough’s work is another Brasília. His model city surely has the geometric perfection and cleverness of a Brasília or an Ujamaa village. Should I be scared of it?

   Probably the answer is simple, if we’re listening to Scott. We need to ask McDonough, “Did you consult with residents to ask how they feel about this city? Or did you impose it from on high, using seemingly perfect principles of architecture and resource conservation?” Like all principles, Scott’s are guidelines rather than rules, but it stands to reason that the people who know how to live are the people who’ll be doing the living, not their overlords.

2. I’d like more examples of successful scientific interventions. Without them, Scott’s book occasionally sounds anti-scientific. Surely it’s not that, but the absence of positive examples makes that a sensible interpretation.

   The $100-billion development question is: how do we combine expert scientific research with indigenous experimentation? How can the West bring its science to nations that could really use the help, without being scientific imperialists about it? What could Western science bring back from Africa and Asia? The Western model of industrial agriculture is really broken, or so it seems to a lot of knowledgeable folks; it would be really helpful to get a rigorous scientific understanding of sustainability from people who’ve sustained their agriculture for thousands of years. I would have liked Scott to provide examples of fruitful two-way collaboration.

This book will appeal to a lot of people. It’ll appeal to those who have already taken Jane Jacobs’s messages about cities to heart. For that matter, it’ll remind a lot of people why they love cities. It goes into more depth on Soviet collectivization than many of us will have encountered. And it will make us think twice before we allow experts to reshape communities from on high.

P.S.: There are some connections here, if I felt like digging, to books like Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart and Toulmin’s Human Understanding. The message of Simple Heuristics is that a lot of rough-and-ready statistical methods might not have the theoretical beauty of, say, linear models, but they’re more likely to work in a broader set of cases when the data don’t conform to the model quite as well; they’re “ecologically rational,” to use Gigerenzer et al.’s phrase. In a lot of cases, Scott seems to be saying that indigenous agriculture is ecologically rational, whereas Western agriculture needs a lot of idealizing assumptions to make the real world look like the laboratory.

Via Ezra Klein: an excellent piece by Michael Pollan on adding substance back to the word “sustainable”. While he’s at it, he gives two pressing examples of unsustainable agriculture that may be entering a crisis right now: bees (with ripple effects into almonds) and pigs (with ripple effects into bacon). It’s an excellent piece, as you would expect from the author of the amazing Omnivore's Dilemma. I include Pollan’s article below.

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The next book I read will probably be one of the following:

• Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism. This is a defense of anarcho-capitalism rather than anarcho-socialism. My friend Sharon recommended it to me years ago, and I’m finally getting around to reading it. It’s only 126 pages long.

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Constance Garnett. This is rather longer.

• Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s Krugman. I mean, c’mon.

• Jacob Hacker, The great risk shift : the assault on American jobs, families, health care, and retirement and how you can fight back. The idea, I gather, is that we’re moving back to an era when citizens bear great risks: getting sick can cost you your life savings, acts of god can leave you homeless, etc. Hacker’s earlier book, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, is supposed to be excellent.

• Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science. I’ve heard a lot of people praise Mooney, whom I formerly took to be just another partisan hack. Sounds like the book is just really solid.

If anyone would like to join me for Happy Reading Funtimes, you are hereby invited.

I just donated $250 to the John Edwards campaign. I hope it helps him win in Iowa and New Hampshire. He has the best plan for health-care reform (as affirmed by people I trust, like Paul Krugman, Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein), he seems to genuinely care about doing the right thing, he’s the only Democratic candidate who’s not making this a campaign about his or her electability, and I think he stands a good shot at winning if we can get past this Keynesian beauty contest mentality. Vote for the candidate you want to see elected, not for the one who you think can be elected.

Actually, let me clarify that last statement. In the final days of the election, it certainly matters whether the candidate is electable. But now is not the time to care about electability. Give money to the candidate who best represents your views, and fight like hell to get him or her through to the nomination. What that means is giving money. I hope you’ll donate to the candidate whom you want to see elected. For my money, that candidate is John Edwards.

I do have a question, though: if Edwards loses the nomination, where does my money go? I should hope it will go to the Democratic nominee.

Paul Krugman has been Barack Obama’s enemy for going on a few months now. On a policy level, Krugman believes that solving the health-care crisis requires “mandates”: forcing everyone to participate. (He never uses the phrase, but he’s trying to solve the adverse-selection problem. Forcing people to get insurance seems like the only way to do this.) Today, on a broader political level, Krugman accuses Obama of being naïve in his quest for reconciliation. A candidate who actually accomplishes anything, says Krugman, will need to fight, and will need to anger some vested interests. Obama is not the man to do that.

I’d bet that Obama’s camp would rather have Krugman on their side. He’s probably America’s foremost progressive. He’s also a brilliant economist, so he can be trusted on a whole range of issues where, say, David Brooks cannot be. I know that I, personally, trust Krugman implicitly. Krugman’s take on the election has made me look more closely at John Edwards.

The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers has now gone through seven editions and is more or less the canonical popular intro to economics. Hence I doubt there’s anything I could say about its content that many, many articles on the web don’t already say. Still, one ought to say something.

The book’s aim is to convince you that economists and their ideas have mattered. In this, it’s a narrower and more vulgarly (in the good sense) written History of Western Philosophy. In the latter, Russell wanted people to stop thinking about philosophers as remote, irrelevant thinkers in togas. Robert Heilbroner is somewhat less successful at convincing us that economists — with the exception of Marx — have had much of an effect beyond the academy. He normally will state without explanation that one idea or another fell like a bombshell; it’s not clear whether these bombs blew up a few dusty university filing cabinets or houses with people living in them.

Where Heilbroner thrives is in sketching the contents of these economists’ ideas. This he does in a few spirited pages per person. In perhaps 5 pages, Heilbroner explains John Maynard Keynes’s ideas with more clarity than I could glean from Robert Skidelsky’s thousand-odd pages of biography. In every one of Heilbroner’s sketches, I found at least one book that will have to go on my to-read list. If that wasn’t enough, Heilbroner includes an extensive, charmingly annotated for-further-reading section at the back.

As a presenter of economic facts and theories, Heilbroner is the best I’ve found so far. His view of economics, though, is less grand than I’ve come to expect. What I get from Sam Bowles is a picture of economics-as-she-could be, and economics-as-she-has-been, that encompasses enormous questions: how institutions form and die, how inferior institutions survive, how people behave at the voting booth, why altruism would spread, and so forth. Heilbroner more or less sticks to the smaller questions: how people spend their money, the rise and fall of capitalist economies, and what practical men can do to spur spending during times of economic crisis. These are surely important questions. They just don’t inspire me quite the way economics does when it’s applied to broader questions of politics and coordination.

Heilbroner’s mind and scope in this book are quite broad, just along a different axis. The opening chapter, in particular, asks and answers the question of why Adam Smith is revered as the first modern economist. What was the world like before Smith? To hear Heilbroner tell it, there was nothing for economics to do before Smith: command economies of the sort that built the Egyptian pyramids didn’t need to worry about where best to allocate resources or what budgets they were operating under: a dictator sent an army of slaves to do his bidding, and that was it. (But surely they had some budget constraint, right? Or was the practical budget constraint so far beyond their needs that it wasn’t an issue?). Feudal economies didn’t need to think of moving economic resources from one use to another or people from one job to another: you were born into your father’s profession and you would die there. The world had to go through astonishing spasms (think even of medieval laws against usury) to make the capitalist world possible; until then economics had nothing to study.

Which is to say that Heilbroner is extremely valuable: he reminds us that the world we live in isn’t the only possible one. There was a time when capitalism didn’t exist, and there will probably come a time when it no longer does. (Schumpeter certainly thought that capitalism had no long-term future.) We need to be reminded of this as often as possible. It’s too easy to view the world with the comfortable certainty of middle-class, early-twenty-first-century American life; it’s nice to be shaken out of that from time to time.

On returning to Cambridge from D.C., where Murky Coffee makes the best espresso you’ll probably ever have, I was sad to find that the 1369 just wasn’t as good as I remembered. The coffee now tasted burned. And the staff didn’t seem nearly as interested in putting out a quality product as the Murky people were — or, for that matter, as interested as the Simon’s people were. Simon’s and Murky are part of a fledgling little world of artisanal espresso shops. 1369 is part of an earlier generation of coffeeshops — of which there are still many — that exist to provide atmosphere rather than coffee. There’s a place for both types. Sometimes you just want to read a book in the presence of other people, even if you’ve got your iPod turned on and you couldn’t care less who the other people are. For that kind of scene, there’s the 1369. For people who are looking for the best conceivable coffee, there’s Simon’s.

Yet Simon’s is also not in a very good location. It’s a 15-minute walk north of Harvard Square on Mass. Ave., or a 5-minute walk south of the Porter T station. From my place to Simon’s is maybe half an hour; I’ve tried going there before work on a few occasions; that doesn’t really work.

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Central Square, I’d like to recommend my recent espresso discovery: Toscanini’s. Tosci is better known for its ice cream (which is certainly the best ice cream I’ve ever had). Turns out their espresso is great, too. They share one very important trait with Simon’s: they use George Howell’s Terroir beans. I’m coming to think that coffee made with Terroir just can’t get very bad. Terroir is insurance against bad baristas. Though the Tosci baristas may be very good; I’m not sure. All I know is that I’ve swung by Toscanini’s on the way to and from work many times now, and have not yet had a bad espresso. Fair warning, though: they made me an exceptionally poor cappuccino once. I think that was because they made it with blue water skim milk.

I’m told I should check out Cafe Pamplona (which has its own Wikipedia entry; I’m amazed, though I shouldn’t be). I’ve now shocked a few people by professing ignorance of this place. Maybe I’ll stop by for an after-work espresso tomorrow.

While I’m at it, I should mention a few Boston espresso destinations:

1. Trident Booksellers and Café, just over the River and a few doors down Newbury Street. Their espresso is nothing special, but their cappuccino is solid and the food in the café is the best in the genre. Plus the bookstore is great. This may be the only bookstore/café I’ve been to where both halves get equal stature.

2. FlatBlack Coffee Company, near the financial district downtown. I’ve only been once. Their drip coffee is solid and rich.

3. Velouria, in Jamaica Plain. Again the beans are George Howell, and the proprietor shares Howell’s love for Kenyan beans. I’ll be honest: my palate is not yet refined enough to tell the difference between one nation’s coffee beans and another’s. Someday … someday.

4. Flour Bakery and Café. Last, but definitely not least. This is Adam’s and my traditional morning-coffee haunt. I love their cappuccino; their espresso is rich without being bitter, and the foam is perfect. Flour is right around the corner from the Children’s Museum. You’re forgiven for not noticing it if you happen to be standing right in front of it; they’ve apparently had a competition with themselves for the last year or so to see just how hidden they can be. There’s always a steady stream of people in there between 7:45 and 8:30 a.m., though, so presumably their reputation is keeping them afloat. I probably give them more business than even my love of their product would justify: I want to see them succeed, and I just can’t imagine that such a hidden outpost would be raking in the cash.

   (Thanks go to Jeremy Angoff, by the way, for introducing me to the South End’s Flour well before there was one on the Waterfront.)

Having just completed Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, I have finished 52 books this year. I’ll want to finish 53 just so that I can say I read at least one book per seven days. But still: 52! Yay me!

Is this a dick move? Isn’t Google just reinventing the Wikipedia? (Via Crooked Timber.)

More pragmatically: what reason would I ever have to write for Google rather than for Wikipedia?

And why can’t Google just outsource this encylopædia job to the Wikipedia? Host all their hardware for them, patch the code when necessary, etc.

I dunno. At first glance this just seems like extreme dickishness.

P.S.: I guess the big differences are that only experts will initially be invited to participate, and that (like Gmail and other Google tools) experts will be able to invite others. This should invite less vandalism than the Wikipedia does, and presumably the caliber of the average ‘knol’ will be higher than the average Wikipedia entry. Such is the idea, I take it. Likewise, the community tools (like allowing you to rate knols) is probably supposed to combat a lot of the things that people dislike about Wikipedia.

We’re getting Swift Boated [1] into talking about the legality of waterboarding, when we ought to be talking about its morality. If we could ever shift the public conversation around to the morality, we could actually frame this in an interesting way: “Do we want our society to look like this?”

Instead we get the ridiculous and profoundly nauseating dance we’ve had for maybe a year now: the administration humbly asserts that if it’s torture, they don’t do it. So do they waterboard? Well, if someone would just tell them it’s torture, they wouldn’t. Then they fight tooth and nail to make sure that waterboarding isn’t labeled ‘torture’.

And the legal discussions are all pointless to begin with. The Bush administration has shown itself willing, over and over again, to push the law as far as it will go, then go further — even to affirm, in signing statements, that it will not take up its obligation to enforce the laws that Congress has passed. So what, exactly, is the point of this legal debate?

One consequence of it is obvious: the public stops caring. It turns from a debate on morality, in which all of us are entitled to participate, to one which we leave to the experts.

The question ought to be simple: what kind of nation do we want? Do we want a nation in which the government has arbitrary power over human life? Do we want to treat foreigners off the battlefield any differently than we treat American citizens in prison? If the majority of Americans believe that Tim McVeigh should have been tortured, that’s one thing. But we’re not even having this discussion.

And, as always, the Democrats are doing nothing to shape the terms of this debate.

[[1]] — I use the term slightly differently than some. I don’t use it as a synonym of, say, “character assassination.” I use it to mean “forcing us to debate propositions that we shouldn’t ever have to debate.”