Steve Reads

I just started on Seeing Like A State, because I accidentally left my copy of The Worldly Philosophers at work. I’m not far into it, so I won’t have much to say. I do, though, have a little worry that I’d like to express here. The book’s argument is that states have forced the world to be well-ordered, because a well-ordered state is an easily managed state. A state could never accept, for instance, a different scheme of property rights from one village to the next; it needed to rationalize property rights so that it could then manage them from above. Hence the cadastral map. I fear that “cadastral map” is to James Scott what “overlapping consensus” was to John Rawls — one of those phrases that sounded good in his mind the first time he said it, and which unaccountably continued to sound good in his head (but in no one else’s) after he’d written it for the five-thousandth time.

In any case, the cadastral map for Scott is the pinnacle of the organizing tendency in modern states. It is an abstraction which they use to shape the reality. This habit of making the world conform to an abstraction is what states are all about, according to Scott.

Now, if Brad DeLong’s review of it is correct, Scott is guilty of attacking corporations on this score too much. So maybe I’ll come around. But as of right now, Scott isn’t really casting his net wide enough. The evils of abstraction are the evils of centralization, not the evils of central government. Large corporations need abstraction, too, if they are to manage a worldwide organization.

So if Scott’s book is to live up to its title, it needs to convince me that statehood caused this process of over-rationalization. Without further evidence, my assumption is that massive centralized states arose in parallel with massive centralized corporations. Did technology allow both to develop at the same time? For instance, did road networks become more reliable? Did legal structures change such that sole proprietorships gave way to joint-stock corporations?

Scott begins with the example of German forestry, which forced monocultured trees into geometric rows with regular spacing and cleared out any underbrush that might get in the way. The first generation of trees was overwhelmingly productive (along the only abstraction that foresters cared about, namely board-feet of lumber). The second generation, 80 years later, was miserable; the abstraction, and its consequent geometric measurement, had ruined all that was healthy about the natural ecology of the forest.

Again, this isn’t specific to states. Read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it becomes clear that this kind of abstraction is typical of any large organization driven by science to its reductive extremes.

I won’t belabor the point; I kind of worry that Scott will. I just wanted to get these thoughts down. If it turns out that Scott violates my expectations and takes this off in a novel or more-general direction, so much the better.

Movable Type is now open-source. (Thanks to Adam Rosi-Kessel for the catch.) It’s licensed under the GPL, which is the most-free license they could have chosen.

I installed a copy of it here today, just to play around with it. At first glance it’s no easier to install or use than WordPress is. If I’m not mistaken, it has the same feature set as WP. It may well have more users than WP; I’m not sure. Certainly the trends appear to be on WordPress’s side.

I hope there’s some part of the MT code that the WordPress people can use. I wonder if any of it is sufficiently factored/factorable that it could be carried over to WP without much effort.

More importantly, I wonder if this is part of the move from software to services. Maybe there’s just no money to be made in blogging software. It could be that the barriers to entry are just too low. Blosxom wasn’t much to write on your blog about, but it got the job done and probably a few thousand people used it for years. Moving up to the next level, where the blog package has a database backend and a nice UI, takes some work, but the WordPress people have done it exceptionally well. They also do blog hosting. Now it’s just a matter of spreading their name around so that people gravitate to them before they find Movable Type or Blogger.

Speaking of Blogger, I wonder whether Google will open-source their code as well and only bother with blogs from the services end. What advantages do they get from writing the software as well as hosting the blogs? I’d think that they’d latch onto an open-source project like WordPress and let them handle all the vulnerability fixes and so forth. Then contribute to WP’s codebase as needed to keep it up to the Google standard. They do have a brand to protect, after all, so they can’t just let the software go to pot. But what if the WP software gets Google all the features and bug-resistance it needs, with none of the development time?

I’ve wondered the same thing about Microsoft. Would there be any negative consequences if they said, “Screw IE: we’ll let Firefox take care of this and contribute where we may”?

It’s a naïve question, certainly. It also lacks any connection to any internal discussions at Microsoft. I’m not a Slashdot person; let’s be clear on that. But I am curious whether it would ever be rational for Microsoft to offload certain of its software on other organizations.

Years ago, somewhere in the comments to this blog, James Grimmelmann mentioned that Gandhi had advocated mass suicide as a more honorable and productive way for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to have died. I’ve always had it in the back of my head to source that quote. When in New York City recently, Stephanie and I happened to grab a collection of George Orwell’s essays off the shelf, wherein we found a citation for that suicide idea: it was in Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs At The World's Crossroads. I ordered it from the library. The quote is below, with lots of context.

P.S.: As it turns out, James mentioned the suicide suggestion on a mailing list we were both on, on May 3 of 2002. Just to be clear.

“I would challenge Hitler to shoot me or cast me into the dungeon,” Gandhi wrote in his article. “I would not wait for fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example … Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy.”

Magnes rejected Gandhi’s idea. “The slightest sign of resistance,” he wrote, “means killing or concentration camps or being done away with otherwise. It is usually in the dead of night that they are spirited away,” Magnes recalled. “No one except their terrified families is the wiser. It makes not even a ripple on the surface of German life. The streets are the same, business goes on as usual, the casual visitor sees nothing. Contrast this with a single hunger strike in an American or English prison, and the public commotion that this arouses.

I said [in an interview with Gandhi], “Did you ever receive a letter, back in 1938 or 1939, from Dr. Judah Magnes, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem? He wrote it after you had made a statement urging the Jews of Germany to practice passive resistance against Hitler.”

“I don’t remember the letter,” Gandhi confessed, “but I remember my own statement. I did not urge passive resistance. That is the wrong term. Many years ago, in South Africa, I spoke at a large public meeting presided over by Herman Kallenbach, a rich Jew of Johannesburg. I lived at his house often and formed an attachment for him. He introduced me as the champion of passive resistance. I stood up and said I did not believe in passive resistance. Satyagraha is something very active. It is the reverse of passive. Submission is passive and I dislike submission. The Jews of Germany made the mistake of submitting to Hitler.”

“Magnes,” I said, “argued in his letter to you that the Jews could do nothing else.”

“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.”

“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”

“Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

When I reported this conversation to Dr. Magnes, he said, “It may be that Gandhi is right in thinking that if the Jews had committed suicide they might have impressed the world more deeply than the loss of six million lives has done. Yet I do not see how in the world such an action would be physically possible. The few hundred in the Fortress of Massada were able to commit suicide because they were in a confined place and were up against a belligerent army. How oculd six million or one million or one hundred thousand do anything of the sort? And if they had, would the impression on the world be nay more lasting than the annihilation of the six million has been?”

Mahatma Gandhi has never lived under a thoroughly totalitarian regime; his generosity and humanity make it difficult for him to realize how very cruel a dictatorship can be. In India, and in Palestine, and other plces, violence or organized nonviolence is a form of “public relations.” …

Thus gandhian nonviolence as well as its ugly opposite — Zionist terror — implies the existence of a free democratic society in England (and in America). It is to this court of public opinion that the resisters in India and kidnappers in Palestine have appealed. But suppose there were no democracy in Western nations?

A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did.

Attention conservation notice: 1,739 words on how we might better serve the downtrodden. Ambles off a little bit into the collective-action problem, touching on a maddeningly clever idea for its solution (someone else’s, I hasten to note).

I picked up Russell’s Proposed Roads To Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism on Cosma‘s advice, to help remedy my woeful ignorance of what “anarchism” used to mean before the right wing hijacked the term. Both left- and right-wing anarchists want to get rid of the state. Left-wing anarchists want to do so out of love of their fellow-men and a desire to see industrial workers treated with humanity; accordingly, they wish to see economic power placed in the hands of the workers, who will own all property collectively. Right-wing anarchists, on the other hand, would see private property expanded as the sole guarantor of individual liberty. At that point right-wing anarchists — the ones I’ve dealt with, anyway — leave aside the most important questions, like how the rights of the weak or the rights of those with poor parents will be protected in a world that venerates private property. But here’s not the place to go into that. Proposed Roads to Freedom isn’t concerned with right-wing anarchism, either:

The modern Anarchism, in the sense in which we shall be concerned with it, is associated with belief in the communal ownership of land and capital, and is thus in an important respect akin to Socialism. This doctrine is properly called Anarchist Com- munism, but as it embraces practically all modern Anarchism, we may ignore individualist Anarchism altogether and concentrate attention upon the communistic form.

It does a good job covering the three isms in the title. Socialism differs from anarchism in that the former wishes an increase in the powers of the state (or maybe the state’s eventual diminution: Russell says Marx isn’t very clear on the point), whereas anarchism desires its eventual and complete disappearance. Syndicalism, in turn, is essentially anarchism organized around industrial unions. Russell’s tone in introducing these concepts is informative, friendly, and never pedantic — the same tone you’d expect from the author of A History of Western Philosophy and The Problems of Philosophy.

The first half of the book is Russell’s survey of the leading socialists and anarchists. The latter half, much the more interesting to my eye, is Russell’s own take on these issues. His method in many of his books is to be a perfectly reasonable man: start with a principle, then hem it in as much as common sense would dictate. In Proposed Roads to Freedom, Russell declares his preference for anarchism, then notes the commonsense objection that it’s probably not stable (nowadays he’d probably say that it’s not evolutionarily stable): other regions not playing the anarchist game would find it easy to invade the anarchists. More importantly, anarchists will have to encounter murderers, rapists, and other violators of the public order. Even if you grant the anarchist premise that much crime is caused by the depredations of the capitalist ruling class, and that prisons are worse than the problem they’re ostensibly curing, you’ll still have to admit that, as Russell puts it, there will be “lunatics in an Anarchist community, and some of these lunatics would, no doubt, be homicidal.”

So Russell is regretfully led to throw over pure anarchism and wish instead for a minimal state. This seems to me entirely reasonable. It does, however, raise the vexed question of how you can keep this minimal state — which will possess guns by definition – from gaining more power. How, in other words, does a “minitarian” state avoid becoming the dictatorship that we were trying to prevent to begin with?

I think we all wish for economic and political systems that are self-regulating: just set the institutions the right way, wind up the clock, and watch everything run perfectly. This is the dream of the anarcho-capitalists, guaranteed by the free market; it was the dream of the Framers of the Constitution, guaranteed by the separation of powers; and for all I know it was Plato’s dream, guaranteed by the Guardians’ (Watchmen’s) golden hearts. (I’m rusty on my Republic, so forgive me.)

At some level it is fundamentally dissatisfying that politics can’t work this way. I haven’t nearly the conceptual arsenal to defend the point just at the moment, but it seems to me that such a self-protected political system may be impossible. Unfortunately, to keep human freedom safe from those who would destroy it, we need to be constantly vigilant; there’s probably no other way. The rules themselves aren’t going to do the hard work for us. I bet that those who have an engineering mentality, especially, find it very hard to avoid dreams of a Final and Lasting Mechanism.

Which is to say that ultimately, I think any successful mechanism design will need to rely on its participants being moral and punishing those who aren’t; when the individuals stop doing that, the collectivity falls. You can’t expect that a system will produce desirable outcomes if all of its members are bastards. I realize that this collides with the 20th-century formulation of the Invisible Hand argument. I’ve not thought through the point terribly much just yet, but it seems right.

Back to Russell. In trying to build his minimal state, he’s most favorably disposed to a system wherein guilds are the centers of political power, with a centralized state to handle things like national defense and public utilities. He comes awfully close to giving a Mancur Olson-style formulation of the collective-action problem. Recall Olson’s argument: when the benefits of a public policy accrue to a small interest group, and the harms are spread widely over the population as a whole, you can expect the interest group to lobby fiercely and face little resistance from the rest of the population. The clearest example here would be free trade: encouraging it may bring great benefits to the society, but it’s far easier for auto manufacturers to measure the benefits of protection. Hence they shape the policy, and the public loses. Russell’s version:

Majority rule, as it exists in large States, is subject to the fatal defect that, in a very great number of questions, only a fraction of the nation have any direct interest or knowledge, yet the others have an equal voice in their settlement. When people have no direct interest in a question they are very apt to be influenced by irrelevant considerations; this is shown in the extraordinary reluctance to grant autonomy to subordinate nations or groups. For this reason, it is very dangerous to allow the nation as a whole to decide on matters which concern only a small section, whether that section be geographical or industrial or defined in any other way. The best cure for this evil, so far as can be seen at present, lies in allowing self-government to every important group within a nation in all matters that affect that group much more than they affect the rest of the community. The government of a group, chosen by the group, will be far more in touch with its constituents, far more conscious of their interests, than a remote Parliament nominally representing the whole country. The most original idea in Syndicalism– adopted and developed by the Guild Socialists–is the idea of making industries self-governing units so far as their internal affairs are concerned. By this method, extended also to such other groups as have clearly separable interests, the evils which have shown themselves in representative democracy can, I believe, be largely overcome.

(This could also be read as a defense of the modern administrative state, where an agency like the FCC has jurisdiction over its areas of specialty and Congress mostly keeps its hands off.)

I’ll have to think hard about this. The solution to the collective-action problem, here, is to grant more power to special interests, not less. Each special interest would have exclusive province over its own issues. It’s intriguing, to say the least, because it would seem to face the special-interest problem head on.

Two problems arise immediately, though:

1. What do we do when the special interests collide? What happens when a tariff favoring the steel industry harms the auto industry, which is then required to charge more for its cars? It’s not at all clear how to resolve this.

2. Who decides which special interests matter? Let’s say we allow steel, automobiles, software and communications technologies to get their own place in the pantheon. What about when a new industry springs to life in 20 years? The existing guilds will hesitate to give up their own power; the structure of the Guild Congress will have to be carefully laid out to encourage new entrants. But again: let’s not assume that a structure will magically save us from each other.

And what makes a Guild Congress any different from the regular U.S. Congress that happens to be controlled by special interests? For that matter, one of the best defenses of the Congress we have, controlled by special interests, is that those special interests are in fact the real representatives: the ACLU, the EFF, the National Association of Manufacturers and so forth all constitute Representative Democracy As She Is Spoke. I doubt Russell would be happy with this in his world of Guild Socialism, however; I think he’d prefer that our political power rest on something nobler than money.

So these are all very interesting principles, and they’re inspiring. But it seems to me that these things always get caught on the details. I don’t deny that socialism, anarchism, or syndicalism could work, but I’d want to see some evidence from, say, another country before I’d consider modifying institutions in the U.S. Ours are imperfect, but, to quote Luther (from “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved”):

“The mad mob … does not ask so much how things can become better, but only that things may be changed; then if things are worse, they will want something still different. Thus they get bumble-bees for flies, and at last they get hornets for bumble-bees.”

So it seems.

If that story is true, at the very least it implies what we already know: this is a party that doesn’t stand for anything.

Given the enormity of their failure, blogs on the left have given the Democrats a remarkably free ride. It’s time to start holding Democrats to account for either being impotent, or being an accomplice to our government’s torture.

…was excellent: perfectly cast (more brilliant child actors, and Nicole Kidman), beautifully set-designed, gorgeously animated, well-paced, and without the religious neutering that I had anticipated: they didn’t shy away from calling the Big Evil People the “Magisterium”. (Then again, if the neutering was there to placate the fundies, they’ll have no problem with evil people getting a Catholic name.)

Highly recommended. Four or five stars.

I have this hazy notion that there is a thing called the “Neoclassical-Keynesian Synthesis”, which tried to fuse Keynes’s ideas (from the General Theory and earlier) on the importance of expectations with the neoclassical utility-maximizing framework (Marshall, Ricardo, etc.). One of Keynes’s colleagues/disciples, John Hicks, wrote a macroeconomic paper shortly after the General Theory came out, entitled “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’; A Suggested Reinterpretation”, that reduces the General Theory to a few equations, and according to Keynes’s other disciples (like Joan Robinson) overly mathematicized the more poetic General Theory. Nonetheless, Hicks’s paper apparently did a lot to bridge the gap between the neoclassical folks, whom Keynes baited, and the newer Keynesians.

This is all very fragmentary knowledge. I’m putting it down here just so that I can put my thoughts somewhat together, and maybe laugh at my ignorance in a few years when I’m a little smarter. And by the way, Krugman had a nice synopsis of the Hicks IS-LM model, which he wrote just before teaching macroeconomics for the first time. Krugman has since released a macro textbook; go figure.

The question that is puzzling me at the moment is whether Robinson’s complaints about mathematicizing Keynes are related to Keynes’s analysis of uncertainty. From the little I know of him, his problem is that many times our knowledge of the future is too limited to make any definite predictions. It’s the uncertainty that is the problem, not the expected value. If I’m asked to take a bet on the future direction of the currency, and the currency has thus far proven unpredictable, I am going to be reluctant to take that bet. In fact I may well stop dealing in currency altogether; I might start bartering instead, under the expectation that the value of my commodities will be more predictable than the value of my money.

Yet if I understand the neoclassical synthesis (caveat: I don’t understand the neoclassical synthesis), uncertainty is only an issue inasmuch as it affects expected values. I can always compute meaningful expected values over future possibilities, and my estimates should only rely on expected values; standard deviations and higher moments don’t factor into it at all. If the expected value is all you care about, you’ll have a hard time even understanding what Keynes was on about. If I don’t know whether a dollar will be worth 5 francs next year or 500, I can at least estimate my expected value for the exchange rate (say, 10), and go from there. So say those who accept the Maximizing Subjective Expected Utility (MSEU) hypothesis, anyway.

This may be all related to the idea among hardcore Bayesians that the idea of “total ignorance” is incoherent. Incoherent it may be, but what I understand of Keynes suggests that this kind of ignorance is absolutely vital when studying people’s perceptions of the future. It may also connect with Keynes’s (quickly abandoned) notion from his Treatise on Probability that not all probabilities can be compared. I’m even sketchier about this than I am about most things.

In any case, you want to understand irrationality: those times when people are so scared of the future that they don’t do as they’re supposed to, and don’t measure subjective expected utilities. Yes, perhaps these people will ultimately be flooded out of the market by arbitrageurs who do behave rationally. Still, in times of economic crisis, you want to understand how to prevent panics. Which entails understanding fear. Which, in turn, means studying man at his least rational.

I apologize if this is mostly nonsensical. I wanted to put my thoughts together before running out the door.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace always feels like it’s going to get dragged down by statistics, but it rarely does. Indeed it’s one of the best presentations of a heavily numerical argument in plain English that I’ve seen.

Keynes wants to convince us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Germany will never be able to pay the reparations demanded of it. Accordingly, the middle 70% of the book is a detailed accounting of Germany’s exports, imports, and internal health. Among many other findings, Keynes shows that Germany couldn’t possibly pay the reparations without giving up most every creature comfort — down to coffee and tobacco. And as for its exports, allowing Germany to wither economically would drag down the rest of Europe with it.

Keynes dispenses with that middle 70% as clearly and briskly as he can, as support for the moral argument. The moral argument, in part, reads like so (footnote pp. 250-251, 1920 edition):

The following is by a writer in the Vossische Zeitung, June 5, 1919, who accompanied the Hoover Mission to the Erzgebirge: “I visited large country districts where 90 per cent of all the children were ricketty and where children of three years are only beginning to walk … Accompany me to a school in the Erzgebirge. You think it is a kindergarten for the little ones. No, these are children of seven and eight years. Tiny faces, with large dull eyes, overshadowed by huge puffed, ricketty foreheads, their small arms just skin and bone, and above the crooked legs with their dislocated joints the swollen, pointed stomachs of the hunger œdema. … ‘You see this child here,’ the physician in charge explained; it consumed an incredible amount of bread, and yet did not get any stronger. I found out that it hid all the bread it received underneath its straw mattress. The fear of hunger was so deeply rooted in the child that it collected stores instead of eating the food: a misguided animal instinct made the dread of hunger worse than the actual pangs.’” Yet there are many persons apparently in whose opinion justice requires that such beings should pay tribute until they are forty or fifty years of age in relief of the British taxpayer.

In large part, Germany cannot pull itself out of this hell until its people have some confidence in the future — until, in effect, they stop hoarding their bread under the mattress and start eating it instead. Keynes explores this from a particular angle than I’d never thought of before:

In the second place, it is a hazardous enterprise for a merchant or a manufacturer to purchase with a foreign credit material for which, when he has imported it or manufactured it, he will receive mark currency of a quite uncertain and possibly unrealizable value. This latter obstacle to the revival of trade is one which easily escapes notice and deserves a little attention. It is impossible at the present time to say what the mark will be worth in terms of foreign currency three or six months or a year hence, and the exchange market can quote no reliable figure. It may be the case, therefore, that a German merchant, careful of his future credit and reputation, who is actually offered a short period credit in terms of sterling or dollars, may be reluctant and doubful whether to accept it. He will owe sterling or dollars, but he will sell his product for marks, and his power, when the time comes, to turn these marks into the currency in which he has to repay his debt is entirely problematic. Business loses its genuine character and becomes no better than a speculation in the exchanges, the fluctuations in which entirely obliterate the normal profits of commerce.

In short: the expectation of unstable currency makes the currency unusable now. The question then becomes: how do we reshape expectations? All of Europe needed Germany’s steel and its coal; but how were they to get it when Germans quite honorably refused to trade marks for pounds or francs? And, in turn, how could they expect to get any currency stability when reparations forced Germany to hand over nearly all of its gold and silver?

This book is an excellent blend of the moral and the statistical, the practical and the hopeful. And it also happens to be a terrific ground-level view of the world immediately after 1919.

I was all set to write about how excited I am at the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. They did a great job with Anna Karenina, and Penguin did a great job packaging it. This was going to segue into my love for the Constance Garnett translations of Dostoevsky; her Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are things of beauty. I recall reading somewhere — probably in his autobiography — that Bertrand Russell couldn’t get into the Russians until he read her translations. In fact I’m pretty sure Russell’s recommendation is what led me to a cheap (and shoddily-bound) edition of Karamazov in Barnes and Noble many years ago.

In any case, I was going to start in about how Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation is making me drool with book envy. But then I looked to see whether Garnett ever translated War and Peace. Turns out she did. The Garnett translation has a few advantages:

1. No matter how good Pevear and Volokhonsky are, I don’t think they hold a candle to Garnett.
2. Garnett is in the public domain now, so the editions based on her translations are cheap.
3. The entire state of Massachusetts isn’t flocking to her translation, whereas they are all flocking to Pevear and Volokhonsky’s. Hence I’m much more likely to find a copy of Garnett in the library than P&V.

I don’t know why it only occurred to me to look for a Garnett War and Peace just now, but it did. Lucky me.

P.S.: My friend Britta asks me a sensible question, which for whatever reason she was unable to post (I’m looking into it): how can someone say that one translation is better than another if he’s never read the original? Valid point. All I can say is similar to what Russell said about Garnett: I’ve not been captivated by other translators nearly as much as I have been by Garnett. This may well mean, for all I know, that I like Garnett more than I like Dostoevsky.

Which brings in interesting points about what the translator’s job is. I know few enough foreign languages to do this any justice. I’ll just point you to Robert Fagles’s notes at the beginning of his translations of Homer.

Basically, I trust other people to tell me whether Garnett’s, Fagles’s, and P&V’s translations are faithfully rendering the originals. Beyond that, it’s a question of the style that the translators bring. And Garnett brings more style than any other translators I’ve read. Though the people who translated The Master and Margarita did a great job, too.

Many of you may not know that stevereads.com is hosted on a server that some friends and I run together. Before any incorrect ideas creep in, let me clarify: “some friends and I” means “Adam Rosi-Kessel”. He does 99% of the work, and we reap the benefits. I help when I can, but he’s just much more on the ball than I am.

Adam’s been engineering a move from our old, tried-and-true server (“bluesky”) to a virtual server run by the unfortunately named RIMU Hosting. They are an amazing hosting company. They provide unbelievable service, and we’ve yanked their founder out of bed at 6:00 in the morning to help us in the move. We’ve been using them for a year or two now, running virtual servers for email and suchlike; now we’re moving absolutely all our data to RIMU’s environment. Adam’s really been on top of making it work. And thus far, it’s worked great.

For this site, in particular. Today I switched the DNS: we were pointing at bluesky, but now we’re pointing at the RIMU box. As far as I can tell, most of the world saw the new address immediately. Hopefully response times will be faster. I’m excited.

So: many thanks to Adam. You’re the best, man.

To get the taste of Skidelsky’s Keynes bio out of my mouth, I’ve settled into reading Keynes’s own Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes wrote it immediately after the Versailles Treaty had been ratified; it is a passionate, frustrated, immensely eloquent attack on the Treaty. Keynes believed that the Treaty went beyond just compensation for the victors in World War I, and descended to barbarism — the French tribe delighting in the torture of the German tribe.

The book is most famous for its character sketches of the negotiators: Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and others. And indeed, the sketches are gripping and evocative. Wilson comes across as puritanical, academic, and completely incapable of understanding politics: placed in a room with political geniuses like Clemenceau and Lloyd George, he never stood a chance. Keynes lets the whip crack where it may; by the time he’s done, there’s nothing left of Wilson. As the opening chapter of Economic Consequences, the brutal sketch of Wilson makes it very clear where Keynes thinks much of the blame lies. Wilson came to Europe with the world at his feet, and with no understanding of practical politics or of how Europe worked. He was committed to his Fourteen Points. Having established his principles, and without any notion of their practical implementation, he dug in his heels, folded his arms across his chest, and waited for others to come along. They didn’t, but they did a great job pretending that they did. They rewrote the Treaty so that it looked like it satisfied the Fourteen Points, even though it didn’t. Wilson accepted it; either he was deceiving himself to salvage a tiny bit of his self-respect, or he was really hoodwinked.

I’ve long known the commonly accepted idea that World War II was a direct outgrowth of Versailles’ horrors, but it wasn’t clear just how miserable the penalties were until I started reading this book. It’s clear from the start that Germany would never be able to pay the reparations. Surely the heads of state knew this. Was Versailles just political meat thrown to their constituents? Were they just going to wait a few years until people forgot about Versailles, then let the treaty die? Or was Clemenceau really out for blood?

I’m only maybe 40% of the way through the book. I’m sure these questions will be answered. In the meantime, Keynes is laying down “mad scientifics,” explaining precisely what kind of money Germany could be expected to pay, and what they’ve actually been commanded to pay.

Of course history has vindicated Keynes, who was apparently too far from the corridors of power to influence events; he was maybe in the foyer of power. Or outside on the gazebo of power. History has confirmed that Germany couldn’t afford to pay, and the world learned its lesson when rebuilding Europe after World War II. So I’m necessarily going to be reading a slanted view of the debate. Clearly the world didn’t listen to Keynes back then. So were they all fools? Surely not. It would be valuable to read the debate, annotated perhaps with the facts as they were known to the participants back then. But we (the non-specialist we) don’t normally read history this way; it’s a cliché, but history is written by the winners. So goes the canon, presumably; Keynes is in the canon, and whatever Clemenceau wrote is not.

I get kind of overwhelmed when I come to New York, because I feel pressured (by myself, mind you, not by anyone else) to eat at a million restaurants. We ate at a good many this time:

• Menchanko-Tei (45th Street at Lexington Ave): noodle soup that gets the job done. If you find yourself nearby, and you’re cold, duck in and get properly warmed. (Does it seem to anyone else that if you just want a solid bowl of soup in the U.S., you have to find an Asian restaurant?)

• Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie (5th Avenue at 85th Street): overpriced and noisy (carpeting would help them a lot). And the food just wasn’t that overwhelming. Though the espresso was tasty.

  (I should also mention here that the Neue Galerie itself is probably great if you’re into Klimt, but is underwhelming if you have no strong feelings about the man. I was under the impression that the Galerie included more art from other late-19th- and early-20th-century Viennese artists. Maybe Klimt was it? If memory serves, they had an entire room devoted to Klimt’s blue smock.)

• Yakitori Totto (55th Street near 8th Ave): exceptional. We spent a long, unrushed evening upstairs, eating various chicken pieces, really meaty mushrooms, some strange but delicious omelette-that-wasn’t, and a remarkable dessert that I believe is what the menu labels “creamy apricot kernel tofu”. I think everyone’s eyes rolled back into his or her head upon tasting it.

  I can’t recommend this place highly enough. Go with friends, and expect to spend $50 or more per person for a wonderful evening.

• Boqueria (short walk from Union Square): Recommended by the New York Times this weekend for very thick hot chocolate with churros. I’d have liked more chocolate — enough to slurp. Instead it was served in dainty cups. Maybe I should have been in a daintier mood.

  Other than the desserts, the tapas were great. I particularly like the date stuffed with an almond and wrapped in bacon. “Wrapped in bacon” always sounds a little low-class, but I hope you agree with me that this is a winning idea.

• Connecticut Muffin, on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn, 5 minutes or so from the subway stop of the same name. The Babe had a great blackened-tofu salad there, and I had a nice cup of tea. Service was attentive and friendly.

• The Farm on Adderley (menu), right next door to Connecticut Muffin. Standouts included the cheese plate and the beet-and-goat-cheese terrine; I could live off that terrine forever. (I wasn’t hungry on this particular occasion, so I spent more time nibbling on appetizers than eating entrées.)

• Taboon (10th Ave and 52nd St, Manhattan): Middle Eastern tapas, found as the second hit to a google search for ‘romantic midtown site:chowhound.com’ (thank you, Chowhound, for being to food what CoffeeGeek is to coffee: a reliable source for high-quality recommendations when I’m in an unfamiliar city). It’s true to its advertising. I had some very potent ouzo that stealthily knocked me on my ass. The squid salad was buttery (The Babe says just ‘creamy’, so take this difference of opinion under advisement). There are various dips for the bread, of the sort that you’d find at similar Middle Eastern restaurants; I expected a smoked eggplant dip, but my expectations were mistaken. The décor is nicely muted, as is the lighting, which explains the ‘romantic’ designation. The romance would be all the better if they turned off the music, which focused on early-to-mid-nineties stuff when we were there. Counting Crows does not belong in a restaurant with heavy drapery; I think the world can agree on that.

  Service, by the way, was exceptional. Our waitress had an accent that I wanted her to keep using. Had she murmured nonsense phonemes, I would have been happy with that.

I should step away from the food here to thank a few people:

• Chris Young, from Explananda, for a really fun time at Boqueria. He explained to Stephanie and me why we should care about Aristotle, and has definitely succeeded in making me want to read more of the old bastard. Plus Chris is just a fun fellow.

• Jamie and Rachel and their daughter Sasha for a couple really nice dinners. Nothing could be better than food with good friends.

• Matt Flynn, of the famous Flynn brothers, to whom I owed a 30th-birthday dinner. Matt is, as always, one of the sweetest, humblest, funniest, most brilliant men you could hope to meet. We’ve known each other for a long, long time, and I hope we continue that tradition.

• Dylan Thurston and Ken Shan, who let me and Stephanie stay at their place in midtown. It was a great location, perhaps 25 feet from Yakitori. Dylan, Ken: you guys are great. Thank you so, so much.

Attention conservation notice: 1800 words on the very excellent, easy-to-read (I basically started and finished it on a train ride from New York to Boston) Cradle to Cradle, eliding into some questions about why corporations haven’t already arrived at McDonough and Braungart’s solutions, if in fact they’re hyper-rational profit maximizers. Brings in Brad DeLong, Seeing Like A State, and The Omnivore's Dilemma : the failure to latch onto M & B’s ideas with both hands seems like an instance of the capitalist insanity that Pollan diagnoses so well.

McDonough’s and Braungart’s point is most succinctly summarized in one of their chapter titles: “Why Being ‘Less Bad’ Is No Good.” Recycling, they say, just postpones the inevitable resource depletion. Plus, recycling normally only takes you one step through the cycle, or less: recycled paper is substantially less strong than new paper, so it needs to be fortified with chemical additives. They give countless examples of processes that seem good but are in fact just less evil. We’re making ourselves less bad by recycling, but we’re not actually solving the larger ecological problem.

The big way to solve it, they say, is for products to assume from the start that they will be thrown away, and embrace that fact. Paper doesn’t recycle well because it wasn’t designed to be recycled; hence it becomes worse with every generation. So Cradle to Cradle is printed on non-paper; it’s recycled plastic. Subject it to a simple chemical process, or to extremely high heat, and the ink detaches to form completely reusable pages. Products need to be infinitely reusable with limited additional processing. People need to be thinking about their products in perfectly closed ecological loops.

The authors envision a day when products will be gleefully thrown on the side of the road as soon-to-be-decomposed litter. Why not build your plastic containers with a little seed inside, so that when they’re thrown overboard they add something to the environment rather than taking away from it? This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but one of this book’s great joys — which keeps it from flying off into Liberal Fairy-Land — is that the authors are architects and industrial designers who’ve spent 20 years designing eco-friendly products and buildings. They impressively helped re-architect the River Rouge factory for the 21st century. Their hopes are quite a bit grander, though: a day when cars themselves will be perfectly recyclable, when their parts can be disassembled, melted down and built into a new, equally high quality car with minimal labor.

The authors’ natural next step is to develop an environmental certification process by which products would be labeled “cradle to cradle” if they’re designed to be environmentally beneficial even when thrown away. This, it seems, is exactly what they’ve done. (Those of my friends who’ve bought environmentally friendly carpeting because they’re concerned about outgassing might look, for instance, at cradle-to-cradle carpet fiber.)

The larger message is that you can’t just look at a product in isolation, or even at a process like recycling in isolation. Look at whole ecosystems, instead. Celebrate organic diversity. Don’t see the world like a corporation, growing one kind of vegetable because it’s cheaper and believing that your responsibility ends at the factory door.

But again, this would be too pie-in-the-sky for the authors’ purposes, not only because they want to make money, but because they need to enlist corporate support if they’re going to get anywhere with their hopes for social improvement. So a good chunk of the book is given over to showing that corporations actually save money in the not-very-long run if they design cradle-to-cradle products. Not least among the savings is avoiding regulation: if your product is only “less bad,” in that it contains (for instance) less mercury, you’ll still have to submit to a government review to make sure you’re being good enough. But if your product is designed from the ground up to help the environment — or even to be edible — you skirt around these environmental problems by design. Just the cost of avoiding regulation, they say, often pays for the re-engineering.

The natural question, then, is: why haven’t companies been jumping on this? Why do American products celebrate consumption-and-disposal over infinite reusability? The natural response is: because consumption-and-disposal is cheaper. But in many cases it’s not, if McDonough and Braungart are right. Instead, companies’ aversion seems to be part of their famous shortsightedness: in the short run, they’re doing what’s best for their stockholders, but they’re not making the investments that would save them lots of money in the long term. But McDonough and Braungart have seemingly brought nontrivial returns to their corporate clients in the space of a decade or less, so this long term isn’t even the famous Keynesian one. Hence their shortsightedness is really short.

Which is really interesting, if you think about it. Why should companies be so shortsighted? If they’re hyper-rational, they’ll have some discount rate: a dollar a year from now is worth only 1/(1+r) dollars today or 1/(1+r)^n dollars n years from now, where r is the interest rate. So maybe a hyper-rational corporation will turn down some long-term projects, but it shouldn’t consistently overlook its own long-term health nearly as often as people accuse it of doing. This is the sort of thing that Cosma Shalizi talks about; there, he blames it on a mismatch between the wishes of the stockholders and those of the management, to be remedied in a particularly cool way.

There could also be an issue of externalities. Maybe the long-term damages accruing to the world from monoculture produce, for instance, never affect the corporations that are perpetrating the damage. As a matter of fact, it seems to be in Monsanto’s interest to keep their particular agricultural model going, wherein crops develop herbicide resistance that requires ever-larger doses of ever-stronger Monsanto herbicides. They see quite clearly the insanity that this is producing, but their own internal calculations may suggest that the party will go on for decades more before anyone cares.

Reading books like Cradle to Cradle and The Omnivore's Dilemma makes it frighteningly clear that the raw economic logic of capitalism may well be self-destructive. Our children develop respiratory illnesses and food allergies at unheard-of rates; we start to suspect that the way our food, water, shoes, clothing, carpeting and 100 products besides are made has something to do with it. Every company is just doing what it needs to do, not looking at the larger picture, and we’re in the crossfire. Some sort of economic coordination starts to seem not only desirable, but absolutely necessary to prevent collective suicide.

It’s pure capitalist logic that tries to make all meat and produce as identical as possible; it’s cheaper to distribute that way, and the factory farms can exploit economies of scale. Cows wallow in a lake of their own shit, but that’s exactly what the economics says we should have. (In fairness, The Omnivore's Dilemma suggests that government policy, particularly the farm bill, has a lot to do with shaping the rewards that tell capitalist enterprises what to raise and how to raise it.)

Which is why Brad DeLong’s review of Seeing Like A State is a little odd. From what I’ve read of Seeing Like A State, James Scott objects to large centralized bureaucracies’ habit of trying to shape their environment and their people to fit a model, rather than adapting their models to the world as it is. DeLong takes real issue with Scott’s claim that

The destruction of metis and its replacement by standardized formulas legible only from the center is virtually inscribed in the activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism.

DeLong retorts:

[W]hen we look around at modern large-scale bureaucratic capitalism, we see what Scott calls “metis” everywhere. Everything from the flick of your wrist so that the supermarket laser-scanner reads the bar code (try it some time) to the virtual experience at flying 747′s that airline pilots gain in simulators to knowing when you have lost your lecture audience and need to back up to knowing when it too risky to drive the moving van over Donner Pass–all of these are forms of metis. Attempts to design-out metis–to turn workers into efficient, pre-programmed automatons as in the imagination of Frederick W. Taylor–usually fail. They fail precisely because they do not make allowance for the importance of local, practical knowledge. And when they fail businesses that recognized the importance of their workers’ skills take up the slack.

Surely capitalism is good for satisfying a lot of people’s wants, and quite often uses local knowledge to design the best products and services for its customers. Surely much of the time, the best product wins and those companies that don’t give customers what they want die. But I hope DeLong doesn’t find it a fatal chink in the armor to realize that sometimes corporations are guilty of the same centralizing tendencies that he hates so much in governments. I don’t have nearly the conceptual arsenal to argue the point right now, but it seems safe to say that, at the very least, economies of scale often contribute to bigness, which in turn contributes to mass standardization, which leads to treating the world as though it were composed of indistinguishable commodities. For evidence of this last, see the portion of Omnivore's Dilemma where Pollan charts the evolution of corn from what we might today call an “artisanal” product – differentiated by manufacturer — to a more or less standard product that can be traded in the thousands of bushels. Corn was not in fact an indistinguishable commodity, but the needs of commerce forced it to be treated that way, which led people to treat it as though it were, which led to massive monoculture which may one day (please, god that I don’t believe in, let it not be so) lead to crop destruction on the scale of the Irish potato famine.

Again, I don’t yet have the skills to argue this as well as I’d like, but: corporations cannot be relied upon, on their own, to get us out of this mess. There is a big coordination problem. It is in Monsanto’s interest, and ADM’s interest, and Cargill’s interest, to keep the process going the way it’s been going. And there are few enough of them that they can collude without even actually talking to one another. One of them moves, and the others know that they all should move the same way. (I believe Posner talks about this somewhere early in Antitrust Law.)

So I wish McDonough and Braungart much luck, and for the sake of the world I hope they become very rich men by convincing corporations that it’s in their best interests to think globally and locally. I just have to wonder, in the meantime, what it is about corporations that makes M & B’s idea so novel.

The whole purpose of David McCullough’s biography of Truman (confusingly entitled Truman) is to rescue the man’s reputation from the historical slough in which he had been cast. The picture of Truman that had apparently become common knowledge was that he was a classless rube, a marionette dangled by the Missouri Pendergast machine. The man was famous for having dropped the Bomb on Japan, at least the second one needlessly; I’ve not yet found anyone who claims that the Nagasaki bomb made Japan surrender when the Hiroshima one did not. Truman was also famous for getting us into Korea, losing lives needlessly there, and (thankfully) putting the reins on MacArthur before he invaded China.

McCullough basically writes all of Truman’s mistakes off as either the carping of the hoity-toity intellectual class (the same people, one presumes, who voted for Adlai Stevenson), or excusable because Truman’s character was fundamentally good. (The cover of Truman is saturated with the rich loam of the American blahblahblah.) He was a straight shooter from the American heartland: the buck stops here and so forth. All the bits about nuking and wars and so forth aren’t so very important after all.

So here’s my prediction: give it a few years, and George Bush will get his own hagiographer. It’s already happened, of course, but it’ll accelerate markedly within a few years of our departure from Iraq … should we ever depart from Iraq. Within 20 years, the trot of the hagiographers will have become a gallop.

Bush’s McCullough is surely already alive. Maybe it’s Karl Rove? Or maybe there’s a populist historian in good standing who’ll do the job. Do we know any young Republican historians? We should start looking now, because surely they’ll “do a McCullough” on Bush within my lifetime.