Steve Reads

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Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy — January 11, 2015

Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

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Boring cover: Yellow inner rectangle on brown outer rectangle, with the book's title and author written on the yellow rectangle

Oh, such a clever book. Such a clever, clever book. It’s what would happen if [book: The Complete Upmanship] were written by a Ph.D. sociologist. It is hilarious in a very dry, British way literally right up to the final footnote on the final page.

[book: The Rise of the Meritocracy] is written from a future-retrospective perspective after Britain has turned fully meritocratic. Now everyone’s place in society is based purely on their merit, not on any other irrelevant details of their personality. To get there, we first had to neuter the power of entrenched wealth; this was achieved through punitive (100%?) estate taxation. Of course this led the wealthy to give their money away while still alive, so more taxation had to be added there.

Then we had to eliminate preference on the basis of seniority. At first this would seem to be anti-meritocratic, but the idea is that, if we want to measure merit, we should measure merit directly rather than measure seniority as its proxy. Hence workers were rigorously tested throughout their lives; whenever they deserved to rise through the ranks, they did so, perhaps leapfrogging those senior to them in the process.

There’s an assumption lurking under all of this, which Young makes explicit only toward the end: economic output is considered the overriding goal of the society. That’s why it makes sense (this comes early on) to get rid of general schools that keep the talented and the less-talented together, and to instead separate out the wheat from the chaff; to do otherwise would be to harm the nation’s overall productivity. In the interests of productivity, then, the bright students must be pulled away from the dull students as early as possible. Hence, essentially, eugenics develop, to identify the talented as soon as possible; again, to do otherwise would be to waste those talents during their formative years. Naturally, of course, any meritocratic system of testing would ensure that if your talents only mature later in life, you should be just as able as the early bloomers to advance to the talented track.

One predictable outcome of all of this is that the children of the talented are overwhelmingly — not 100%, but overwhelmingly — talented. We thus seem to have reinvented the hereditary aristocracy, only this time under the ostensibly benign guidance of talent rather than nobility. By the time Young tells his fictional future story, the population has largely grown to internalize the wisdom of the existing social order, just as (Young says somewhere) those born during the era of the hereditary nobility never questioned the wisdom of granting power in proportion to landownership. Of course, there are those among the lowest classes who scream from the fringes, but they’re disorganized. And since, by this point, all the most talented people have been siphoned off into a meritocratic upper class, the lower classes are represented by only the least talented. So the system is nicely self-reinforcing.

Tremendous, disturbingly hilarious read. Highly recommended.

What I read over winter vacation (and a few days afterward) — January 10, 2015

What I read over winter vacation (and a few days afterward)

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My partner and I are lucky enough to be able to go away on vacation every year around Christmas, and to spend a week doing almost literally nothing other than reading books on the beach. It’s heavenly. Here are some quick synopses of what I read on the beach, and a few that I’ve read since she and I got back.

* Daniel Bell, [book: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism]

Capitalism ultimately murders the culture that sustains it, says Daniel Bell. We start with Protestant capitalism, or so he and Weber say; bourgeois capitalists set aside money to build their businesses, trading off some pleasure today for a brighter tomorrow. Over time the connection between Protestantism and capitalism has been sundered, so now capitalist society is based on mere acquisitiveness. And the libertarian ethos has changed us from a society of the “we” (our church, our society) to a culture of the “I”. Capitalism begets libertarian individualism, which begets destruction of community, which begets the end of the sociological support that makes capitalism even possible.

This I get, and it makes sense to me. A significant chunk of his book, though, is given over to the decay in avant-garde art, because Bell seems to equate “culture” with artistic innovation. The avant-garde, he says, must always (just look at its very name) set itself against the society that it lives in. But the bourgeois-capitalist society of the “I” rejects all limits on what man can do. The avant-garde wants to say to society, “Here is a limit you have placed on me, and here I am rejecting it!” To which society now says, “You have no limits; go do whatever you want.” How can avant-garde artists even exist in this limitless environment?

Which … fine. But I don’t see how it relates to the cultural underpinnings of capitalism. Maybe it does, but Bell seems to just take it as given that the avant-garde is important to the society in which it exists. Is it so? Is avant-garde art really a social support? Bell follows three broad pillars beneath a society: the economic, the political, and the cultural, and he just seems to take it as given that “culture” is synonymous with “high art”. I don’t see why.

Much of the book is tiresome, in the way that reading a lot of authors who believe they’ve found the one true key to unlock all of human knowledge is tiresome. And when he gets around to treating the problem of race relations in the U.S., it gets farcically bad. On page 198 he finds it paradoxical, for instance, that black people (“The blacks,” if you’re Daniel Bell) insist on being treated as a group (here he means things like affirmative action, as I recall), rather than as individuals … and seems to be completely unaware that *they were enslaved as a group*. These ungrateful blacks, demanding that after 500 years of being enslaved purely because of the color of their skin, they be treated differently than whites. How dare they!

Daniel Bell may have met the new definition of “douchebag”.

* John Duffy, [book: The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health]

This book is utterly fascinating. I’ve known in a general way for a while that nearly all the strides in health that the U.S. has made in the last 150 years have come from public health: vaccination, trash disposal, sewers, clean water for U.S. cities, and on and on. I’d not known a lot of the details, which Duffy runs through masterfully. He’s clearly so excited about the great works that public health has done for Americans that he’s nearly out of breath trying to convey them all. I contend that it’s impossible to finish this book without wanting to use public health to fix all of America’s current ills.

It turns out that that’s a bit of a problem for the discipline: once the problem of contagious disease as the prime killer had been eradicated, it was less than clear to the public-health community what the discipline actually *did*. What *isn’t* public health, really? Gun control is a public-health measure. Inasmuch as a better-educated populace is a healthier populace, public schools are a public-health measure. Meanwhile, medicine — working with patients one-on-one, rather than helping a whole population at once — had stolen public health’s fire. We’re now inclined to view fixing health as a problem of doctors, hospitals, and big machines, rather than as a problem of, say, making cities more walkable.

I can’t even really define for you where the boundary between public health and medicine is. Is vaccination a medical advancement, or a public-health advancement? How about publishing guidelines on babies’ vaccination schedules? Or how about the fascinating bit in Duffy, where he describes giving newborns eye drops to prevent blindness resulting from their parents’ gonorrhea? Perhaps it’s public health if it’s done on a broad scale? Whatever the taxonomy, the results have been remarkable.

Did you know that pasteurizing milk went a long way toward ending the scourge of tuberculosis? I did not.

Then there’s the philosophical thread underlying much of the history of American public health. It was believed, for a long while, that a certain amount of TB and a certain amount of yellow fever were just naturally going to appear in populations. Hence some people were just unavoidably going to die. I would love to trace what’s viewed as “natural” across many different human endeavors. We clearly no longer believe that death in infancy is natural, and in general I don’t think we believe it any more in areas that have been medicalized; we believe that everyone is entitled to — and should be able to attain — a healthy life of at least 80 years, let’s say. But I think we’re still implicitly committed to a belief that certain people are just “naturally” going to be poor. What if we got rid of that? Not only got rid of it, but what if we moved to a point where “some Americans are just going to be poor” sounded as ridiculous to modern ears as “some people are going to die of TB”?

* Peter Pesic, [book: Abel’s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability]

Remember the quadratic equation you learned in middle or high school? Given the “general quadratic” [math: ax2 + bx + c = 0], there’s a formula called the Quadratic Formula (in Mrs. Rainey’s eighth-grade class, we sang it) which tells you exactly what values of [math: x] will make that true. Turns out there are two such values, not necessarily distinct. The highest power in the equation is 2, and the number of solutions (“roots”) is 2. That’s not an accident: Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the few greatest mathematicians who’s ever lived, was the first to prove that a polynomial whose highest power is [math: n] has [math: n] roots.

There’s a formula, like the quadratic, that gives the exact answers when [math: n = 3]; it’s much longer than the quadratic formula, but you can write it down. The formula is simple, in that it contains only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and roots (e.g., square roots). There’s a much longer formula when [math: n = 4].

Which raises a natural question: if *every* polynomial of degree [math: n] has [math: n] roots, and if we can get explicit formulas for [math: n] less than 5, then can we get a formula for [math: n = 5] and higher?

The remarkable answer is no, and it took until Niels Henrik Abel in the 19th century to prove this conclusively. You can find a formula for the roots of the “general quintic” that uses much more complicated mathematical functions than addition, subtraction, and so forth, but absolutely no formula based on elementary mathematical operations will suffice.

Pesic’s book walks me right up to the edge of understanding why this would be, but doesn’t get me over the line. He walks quite coherently through several hundred years of history of assaults on this problem, with attempted methods and incorrect proofs; but when it comes to actually explaining Abel’s successful method, he loses me. He explains the outline of what we would now call the algebraic proof; it has something to do with the subgroups of a certain mathematical group, but I don’t understand why that subgroup matters.

At the general level of method, I get why Pesic thinks algebra is so cool. The point of mathematical abstraction is to clear away the parts of a problem that are inessential to its solution, to see only the parts that make the problem tick; abstraction isn’t for its own sweet sake, but is rather a simplification method that should make the assault on problems easier. The concept of “number”, for instance, is probably the mathematical abstraction we’re most fluent with; if someone asks you how many oranges there are in total between two separate piles of oranges, the fact of their orangeness isn’t relevant, so it may as well be set aside, leaving only the abstract problem of the addition of two numbers. This process of abstracting to simplify a problem is so natural to us in the context of numbers that we may not always be aware of what we’re doing.

Apparently Pesic wants to show us that the group-theoretic abstractions underlying Abel’s proof are of this same form: that with inessential distinctions swept away, the boundaries of the underlying problem become clear. I get the general approach here, but I don’t get the particular attack on the particular problem. Perhaps this lack of understanding is the reader’s fault, or perhaps it’s the author’s.

* Donald M.G. Sutherland, [book: France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution]

Apparently there’s a long-raging debate in the study of the French Revolution over how much support the Revolution had from the common people. Was the Revolution really a revolution of the bourgeois? Or did it have popular support?

If I’m reading Sutherland right — in fact, if my sense of the French Revolution in general is right — the Revolution was just far too anarchic to answer this question in general. The Revolution starts out with few specific goals, it seems: the peasants are rioting over high bread prices, a poor crop, and the centuries-long corruption of their government (see “tax farming”). Eventually the revolution eats its own, with the necks of Danton and Robespierre — among the intellectual fathers of the Revolution — under the guillotine.

The Revolution is almost unfathomably anarchic to me. All the existing order was turned upside-down. Fairly early in the Revolution, the revolutionaries sold off lands owned by the Catholic Church, then issued a currency (the ill-fated [foreign: assignats]) deriving its value from this land. I’m trying to imagine a similar upending of American life, and it’s hard for me to come up with anything comparable.

In parts of France, the anti-church revolution didn’t play so well; this is how we end up with the [foreign: chouans] in western France — a spontaneous counterrevolutionary uprising by those who didn’t necessarily miss royalty (though there was some of that), but who thought that the Revolution had destroyed important pats of their spiritual ways of life.

I honestly can’t keep track of all the moves and the countermoves in the Revolution when covered as carefully as Sutherland does. This isn’t a knock on him at all; I think his whole point is that if you’re going to answer a big question about the people’s support for the Revolution, you need to answer it [foreign: département] by [foreign: département]. Even just trying to fathom a man like Napoléon would take volumes, and he’s only a small fraction of Sutherland’s book. Sutherland is admirably comprehensive and patient.

* Lorrie Moore, [book: Birds of America: Stories]

A lot of rather short stories (I didn’t count, but I’d wager that they average 15 pages) of rather sad people trying to navigate romantic relationships and adulthood. The characters themselves, and the book, have a grim, absurdist humor to them.

One story in the book will be particularly useful to you if you find yourself unable to name or sing a single song, if your girlfriend breaks up with you as a result, if you get fired from your job, and if you then go on a spree of house robberies where you tie up the occupants, put a gun to their heads, and ask them to sing a song — any song — for you.

Another will prove useful if you accidentally kill a friend’s baby, then spend the next seven months holed up in an attic.

* William Poundstone, [book: Prisoner’s Dilemma]

Such a fascinating, disturbing book. It’s primarily concerned with the use of game theory during the nuclear arms race. I think the first part that really blew my mind was the observation that Bertrand Russell, of all people, once advocated pre-emptive nuclear war on the Soviet Union. I had always thought that pre-emptive war was the domain of lunatics like Curtis LeMay. Russell was far from a lunatic; it was only a matter of time, he said, before the Soviets got the Bomb, at which point nuclear war between the two great powers would become inevitable. Better to destroy the enemy now, before they managed to reach parity. And once you’ve decided that you’re going to pre-emptively destroy them, why wait? To quote John von Neumann (of whom more in a moment), “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

Whereupon Poundstone investigates the question of whether the U.S. had enough nukes on hand, during its period of unrivaled superiority, to destroy the USSR. Seems like not: for the first few years after Hiroshima, it only had a few bombs on hand; soon after that, Russia got the bomb, and the rest was history. And of course this gives an answer to von Neumann’s question: the reason not to bomb them now is that you only have a few bombs. Russia is a very large country. Sure, you could destroy Moscow and maybe Saint Petersburg, but you’d leave much of the country standing and ready to fight back. As I recall, the Russians relocated most of their heavy industry to the east during the Nazi invasion.

This kind of casually formal thinking-about-blowing-them-up seems like it was [foreign: de rigueur] during the Cold War. You can see how it would follow with half the precision of a logical proof, once you’d decided that your goal was to optimize the outcome of a nuclear attack. You can also see — this is the other half — how it’s completely insane. But in some sense it’s only collectively insane. If you don’t know what the other guy is thinking, but you suspect that he’s thinking just like you, and furthermore if there’s no way for you and the other guy to bind one another to do right, then you’re stuck making decisions that are correct from your perspective but very wrong from a global perspective. This is the crux of the prisoner’s dilemma in the title of Poundstone’s book: yes, it’s insane, but it’s the least-insane possible outcome. Suppose you decide to be the good guy and promise to destroy all your nukes. There’s no way for the other guy to know that you’re actually going to do this. If you actually do destroy your nukes, then the best outcome for the other guy is to secretly ramp up his production; that way he’s got the leg up, and can perhaps achieve global nuclear hegemony. Whereas if you don’t destroy your nukes, then it would be an act of suicide for the other guy to destroy his. So in either case, it makes sense for the other guy to manufacture more nukes. And since the U.S. and the USSR are both running through the same calculus, we can expect they’ll both end up at the same conclusion: manufacture more nukes. Now both sides are armed to the hilt, which is not an outcome that either side wanted. But it’s the best they could do, under the circumstances.

Poundstone’s book is a good survey of game theory as it was used during the Cold War — indeed, used and invented by one of the most brilliant figures of the Cold War, namely John von Neumann. von Neumann was one of the few greatest mathematicians of the last hundred years, who made significant contributions to pure mathematics and quantum mechanics, while inventing the theoretical underpinnings of the computer I’m typing this on, helping to build one of the earliest physical computers and, oh yes, co-inventing game theory. Rather more of the book that I might like is devoted to a study of von Neumann the person, which isn’t really relevant to the rest of the book. Those biographical aspects might be intended to overcome the image of von Neumann-as-inspiration-for-the-character-of-Dr.-Strangelove. (Me, I always thought Strangelove was based on Edward Teller. He was probably an amalgam of many such men. For all I know, now, he could have been inspired by Bertrand Russell.)

As it should, Poundstone’s book later on gets us to how we might escape the prisoner’s dilemma. On this topic you should read Robert Axelrod’s great, hugely influential [book: Evolution of Cooperation]. The basic gist is that a lot changes if you and I play repeated games against one another, rather than a single shot. If you refuse to be a scoundrel in your dealings with me — if you don’t “defect,” in the terminology of the formal game — then a good strategy is for me to not defect against you, either; but if you do defect, I should retaliate. This strategy of being nice until the other guy isn’t, then punishing, then quickly forgiving — is called “tit for tat”, and it’s gotten a huge amount of attention. Some of my favorite economists have turned it into a fundamental principle in the ethical organization of humanity.

Axelrod shows that the outcome of the repeated prisoner’s dilemma depends upon what he poetically calls the “shadow of the future”: if you know that the game is going to go on for a long time, you’ll behave much differently than if you know it’ll end today. If you know that this is your last game, then you needn’t worry about retaliation if you’re a scoundrel. So according to the utility-maximization theory, you’ll be a scoundrel during the last round. And both sides know that you’ll be a scoundrel. So the other guy expects you to be a scoundrel in the last round, and you expect him to do the same. And if you’re going to be a scoundrel in the last round no matter what, then there’s no value in the other guy’s being nice during the last-but-one round: he’s not going to get any points later on for being nice. So he’s a scoundrel in the last-but-one round. And you know that he’s going to be a scoundrel in the last-but-one round …

You see where this is going. If there’s a known endpoint, backward induction makes the whole repeated game fall apart right away. Whereas if you don’t know when the game will end, you’ll continue to be a good guy rather than a scoundrel.

I always want to face off this attitude against the ethical teaching that you should do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you. Those following the golden rule might be suckers, as far as game theory is concerned. Because of the dark times we live in, we’re supposed to have to justify the golden rule to the economists or to naïve Darwinian theory. “How could the golden rule possibly survive in a world of scoundrels?” This is where evolutionary game theory (see Maynard Smith’s wonderful [book: Evolution and the Theory of Games]) would come in. You’d want to show that the golden rule is an “evolutionarily stable strategy”: that a population of humans following the golden rule could not be defeated by a population of invaders who refuse to follow it. I could come up with a model whereby this is true; I could also come up with one where it isn’t.

I’d prefer to avoid the whole discussion altogether, or sigh at the society which thinks that discussion is even necessary. I’d prefer to live in a society where adherence to the golden rule is so unquestioned that even raising these evolutionary objections is considered disgraceful. You treat your neighbors well because that’s the right thing to do; end of story.

Barring that, the formal theory may be useful: perhaps the golden rule is more likely to take root in a community where people are forced to repeatedly interact with one another. This turns the golden rule into an outcome of cold-blooded calculation rather than a deeply felt ethical principle. And it also raises a very difficult question: in an urban, capitalist world of bloodless, anonymous transactions, the parties to which are often thousands of miles apart, should we expect that the whole world will soon enough turn into scoundrels? Finding a theory that salvages the golden rule in the industrial era would seem incredibly urgent.

* Atul Gawande, [book: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End]

This is a lovely, sad commentary on end-of-life care, by a surgeon who has seen the end of many lives. He charts the evolution of death from something that happened in your house, with your family (with whom you lived), to something that happened in a hospital, to something that happened in grim, industrial nursing homes, to something that may now be happening in warmer environments like assisted-living facilities.

There are two connected kinds of trouble here. First, it seems that there comes a point in every person’s life when he or she needs medical help beyond the level that an assisted-living facility can provide. You want to live independently as long as you possibly can, but there comes a point when you just can’t anymore. And second, once you’ve reached that point, you return to the industrialized medical system, where doctors view it as their solemn duty to do everything they can to keep you alive.

But mere living isn’t the point of life. We want to live a life under our own control, doing what’s important to us: spending time with our families, engaging in meaningful work, traveling, or whatever. Gawande wants doctors to spend more time understanding what patients want, then helping them pursue that rather than pursue the mere accumulation of miserable years. It’s a sad, thoughtful, important book.

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems — December 20, 2014

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

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The only mildly interesting thing about this cover is that it turns the ampersand between 'public' and 'its' into a music staff, which then flows left to right across the page, underlining 'The public' and 'its problems'.

John Dewey says that the term ‘public’ isn’t vacuous: if I buy a used car from you, that’s a transaction between two private actors that doesn’t radiate (arguably) beyond the two of us. What counts as ‘public’ are exactly those transactions whose effects spill beyond those involved in them. The state is called into being to regulate actions which are public in this sense. This defines government not by its origins or its particular means of accomplishing what it accomplishes, but rather by a set of effects that it wants to regulate. This is Dewey’s philosophy throughout [book: The Public and Its Problems]: look always at effects as a way of clarifying things. (Does this make him a pragmatist? A consequentialist? Anyway, consistent with what Dewey himself might say, the label doesn’t matter so long as we all know what we’re talking about in any specific case.)

But then it gets confusing, first because, obviously, you can make the case that most any transaction has consequences that spill beyond the immediate actors. (Let’s do like the economists do and call these ‘externalities.’ There are both negative and positive externalities, depending upon whether we like the consequences.) I buy a pack of cigarettes from the corner store, then go and smoke one of them on the street corner; should the cashier at the bodega be required to pay for his role in my covering passersby with secondhand smoke?

The second reason why this definition of ‘public’ gets confusing is specific to Dewey’s book. When my dentist puts surgical implements in my mouth, that’s purely private; but society has an interest, Dewey says, in regulating dental licensure generally. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t really pursue this distinction between the act and the general environment in which the act takes place, but it seems rather important. It’s also interesting that he doesn’t pursue the direction that some libertarian economists would take, namely that (in the age of Yelp especially, let’s say) the fear of a bad reputation is a sufficient replacement for licensure. But in any case: if one private transaction isn’t public, then what makes many such transactions, considered in the aggregate, public? You and I can both think of obvious explanations here, so there’s no real need to pursue them. And perhaps it’s for the best: maybe Dewey didn’t exist in a time of fatuous libertarians, so he didn’t feel obliged to justify himself to them. It was a better time for everyone.

We live, and Dewey lived, in an era when industrialization had upended much of what we thought about the public and about community. The doctrine of individualism, which did much to break the bonds of society, was born at the same time as steam-power, and in Dewey’s telling this is not coincidental: inventors had unlocked great potential in man through the use of labor-saving machinery, yet mercantilism and royalty conspired to prevent its full use. Individualism was meant to break free from this, and save man from stifling collectives. But ironically, says Dewey, the doctrine arose just as man’s individual identity was being submerged within giant institutions run by industrialists. Individualism, in this telling, is the thin transition layer between eras of repression.

After industrialization, people moved off to live in cities, thereby destroying the close personal connections that they might have had with their neighbors. In that earlier era we might have had a ‘community’; now we don’t. The small-scale community has been replaced with a large-scale mob. A large number of people, each watching the same television program, does not a community make. People like Walter Lippmann would then say, well, to hell with the community; you can’t organize a functioning government out of an ignorant mass. Lippmann would say, let’s have rule by the technocratic élite. Dewey pushes in the opposite direction: reconstruct community out of that mob. And the way to do that, in the modern era, is by means of the same mass communication that so lamely connects us.

The community of physical scientists, which has flourished during the era of industrialization, is one model for the great community that Dewey envisions. He says that we’ve mastered the physical sciences but done little with the human sciences, and that mastering the human sciences is a necessary step on the road to building the great community. I hear in here an optimistic story of how, say, business cycles can be controlled. I can’t draw you a complete picture of how we got from there to here, but I would hazard a guess that economists as a group are less optimistic than Dewey was, nearly a century ago, about the prospects of economic control.

When it really mattered — during the first and second world wars — we certainly did manage to control the economy plenty well. That’s a story about which I’ve read little. I know its broad outlines, and some of its details; in [book: Bowling Alone], I think it was, the author notes that eighty percent of American males were involved in the war effort during World War II. It might even be more specific or greater than that: it might be 80% of all Americans (including, say, women working in explosives factories at home), or it might be that 80% of all males served in uniform. But in any case, a significant fraction of Americans’ labor was redirected into total war. This must have meant that a significant fraction of labor which had been involved in producing food for domestic consumption was now solely producing it for soldiers on the front lines. Likewise at every scale of economic production, from shoes up to civilian aircraft. Since the economy had now converted most of its slack resources (human and otherwise) into military production, there was a great risk of inflation. The government responded to this by limiting wages, imposing rationing, etc. So when we need to harness collective energies, we can. The rest of the time, we choose not to. (This would be of a piece with Piketty‘s depressing observation that inequality has only really decreased when war has taken the asset-owning class’s assets and blown them up. It’s also of a piece with all of [book: Bowling Alone].)

The challenge, then, is to construct a community without the impetus of war. When people feel peace within their communities and their society, they will feel peace in their own minds. The life of an individual human is inseparable from the life of his or her community; sickness in the one will lead to sickness in the other. I take from Dewey a very optimistic view of how to return peace to humans, and to human civilization.

Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public — December 17, 2014

Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

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The boringest book cover ever. Basically nothing apart from a few miscellaneous colors and the book title in white.

At some level, the central thesis of this book is unobjectionable: the public can’t possibly be expected to pay attention to, and consider in a thoughtful way, every issue of public import. Society is complicated, and none of us can be an expert on everything that’s important. We can’t all know about the science behind global warming, the proper response to the ISIS threat, how we should handle income inequality (sidebar: can we talk about asset inequality instead? It’s likely to be a more durable problem), and so on. So, Lippmann says, let’s just give up on the unattainable ideal of mass democracy. It made sense in ancient Athens, and it may make sense in small towns; but in a large, complex, industrial democracy, we’re pining for an ideal that made sense to Jefferson but stopped making sense a few decades later.

Lippmann not only thinks that mass democracy is an unattainable ideal; he thinks it would be a bad idea even if it were possible for all of us to weigh in on every subject. Perhaps the Internet makes it possible, for instance, to give everyone a vote on every subject. Were Lippmann alive today, he’d tell us that we’d just make a hash of it, and that we should ditch such an idea. Again, we’re all, most of us, most of the time, going to be ignorant on most topics that come before us.

So we delegate to those who know better. We delegate telecommunications policy to the FCC and to the relevant Congressional committees; we delegate health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services; etc.

Considered properly, says Lippmann, there’s actually no such thing as ‘the public’ which is interested in this or that subject. There are many different publics. My public might be concerned with privacy on the Internet in the post-Edward Snowden era; your public might be concerned with gun rights. There is no such thing as ‘the public’.

That seems very wrong to me, inasmuch as all of these things affect all of us. When my child’s school gets shot up by an outcast eighth grader, I’m concerned very much with gun rights; when Google hands your search results over to the FBI without a warrant, I hope you’re concerned about your privacy. Defining a ‘public’ and its particular problems by the issues on which it can knowledgeably weigh in seems rather limited.

The ideal that Lippmann seems to be chasing is a technocratic elite: I delegate the solution to these problems to someone who (it’s stipulated) knows how to solve them better than I do. But mightn’t the technocrats be captured by those they’re regulating, or might they indeed be self-serving? Indeed they might. To solve this problem, Lippmann introduces a (grudging?) role for the public: we get to watch our technocratic betters debate one another, and we get to decide whether one or both of them is self-serving.

Even by the terms of Lippmann’s own argument, this seems wrong-headed. Suppose two parties are debating what should be done about asset inequality. One side proposes a small asset tax. The other side says that there’s not even a problem to solve; it says that asset inequality is what the Madonnas and Bill Gateses of the world deserve. According to Lippmann, we in the public are not supposed to be involved in deciding matters of policy, so let’s make this debate Lippmann-friendly and say that it’s between two politicians who are supposed to go and solve the problem of asset inequality — or not, depending upon which one we choose. Well, what now? Both sides seem quite earnest; I trust that both the Democrats (Piketty’s side, roughly) and the Republicans (Mankiw’s) believe sincerely that their views of the world are correct, and that the other side is making a major, harmful mistake. So neither is self-serving. And by stipulation, the public is too ignorant to decide on matters of policy. Yet we’re supposed to be smart enough to choose between two men arguing vehemently over fundamental values underlying those matters of policy. Does not compute. If we’re too ignorant to do the one, then we’re too ignorant to do the other.

Maybe Lippmann believes that we can educate the public to the point where it can at least choose its delegates. Nope; he nixes that idea quite early on. Education moves too slowly, he says. To properly educate Americans in matters of public import, it doesn’t suffice to just teach people broad principles; you’d need to teach them about ISIS and asset inequality and so forth.

So the only option that Lippmann seems to have left us with is to do a poor job delegating to our betters over matters that we fundamentally don’t understand.

The problem here isn’t just that Lippmann has left us with a poor system; it’s that his whole perspective on democracy is wrong. The point of democratic self-government isn’t to solve particular problems optimally; the point of democratic self-government *is democratic self-government*. Democracy isn’t the means; it’s the end. And consequently, I think Lippmann *also* has the wrong picture of the public that he’s facing. He’s picturing the members of a static public, who hold a set of mostly ignorant beliefs on a small set of issues — as opposed to a public which improves itself in order to make itself worthy of its own self-government. Without really saying so, I wonder whether Lippmann is like an economist, solving a static optimization problem: what’s the right way to process a certain fixed set of inputs to achieve a fixed goal?

Consider a narrower problem, namely free speech. There are terrible people out there who use speech to spew hatred. If I were to tell you that the solution to this problem is to limit speech to those who can use it correctly, you would rightly yell me out of the room. You’d do the same if I offered to limit voting to those who scored above a certain minimum level on an intelligence test. That’s because, to repeat, *the point of democracy is not to yield better outcomes*. Democracy, free speech, and the right to vote would all be desirable ways of structuring a society *even if* they led to terrible outcomes.

And do they lead to terrible outcomes? The only sensible way to answer that is “Compared to what?” (ObQuote: Churchill on how democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.) Is Lippmann’s technocratic élite, with a largely pliant public that delegates its power every few years and then passively watches for the next few years, any better? That’s an empirical question, but I think it’s fair to say that the historical record has been rather mixed. Halberstam’s [book: The Best and the Brightest] comes to mind: the Kennedy administration was filled with people like Robert McNamara — a man who had organized the strategic bombing of Germany, had run Ford, and had graduated from Berkeley. These were brilliant men with all the right credentials. Yet the Kennedy men still got us into Vietnam. (Did Walter Lippmann graduate from Harvard? If you’ve read this book, the question answers itself.) On a gut level, I’m willing to call the historical battle between democratic self-government and technocratic management a draw, at best.

So in practice the argument for technocratic management is ambiguous at best. In principle it’s appalling.

The only reason I picked up [book: The Phantom Public] is because I’ve heard such wonderful things over the years about John Dewey’s [book: The Public and Its Problems], which (according to the Wikipedia) is a direct response to Lippmann’s book. I’m expecting much better things from Dewey. I move on to him next.

Alice Goffman, On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City — December 15, 2014

Alice Goffman, On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

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Photo of an alleyway between two dingy-looking inner-city buildings with a busted-up sidewalk out front.

There’s a real risk that a book like this will be disaster porn — self-aggrandizing disaster porn, no less. As a matter of fact I think that’s the problem that Slate had with Goffman’s book. They believe that her book plays into all the stereotypes about urban black life — dominated as it is, in the American mind, by crack cocaine, gang violence, broken homes, and bombed-out inner cities.

And that is, indeed, the picture that Goffman paints. She lived for years in a run-down Philadelphia neighborhood, the only white girl in the area. At the beginning she just watched and listened and tried to hide while observing. Eventually she worked her way into her neighbors’ good graces and somehow, oddly, seemed to be riding along with everyone as everything happened to them: shootouts, drug deals, police pat-downs. She ran away from the cops alongside her friends. One time she and the neighbors even watched the police strangle one of their friends to death.

Not much that’s uplifting happens to anyone. All three of one woman’s children are either in prison or dead by the end of the book. Her father lives upstairs in her house, keeping his piece of it neat and tidy while she lives on the first floor and allows it to become infested with roaches.

Always, everywhere, the police are watching over Goffman’s friends, waiting for any chance to book them for something and reach their informal monthly quotas. Goffman says police will hound her black friends anywhere they can find them: at her friends’ jobs, when her friends are in the hospital, or even when her friends are attending funerals. This is, I would say, the most controversial part of Goffman’s book, and the aforelinked Slate piece expresses some (mild) doubts that this could even be possible. Do the police even have the resources to run the records of everyone staying at a hospital? Aren’t they focusing on other things? Makes me consider the possibilities that either Goffman just made this stuff up, that she’s hanging around with particularly bad dudes whom the police would bother expending this many resources on, or that reality is really so much worse than I could ever have envisioned.

You have to grant this premise that the police are omnipresent in the lives of inner-city black Philadelphians, or much of the rest of the book just doesn’t make sense. Since black youth expect the police to be on their case everywhere, and expect that they’ll be jailed at the first hint of misbehavior, they are wary of being anywhere where the police can find them. This means they can’t hold down a regular job; they can’t spend time where the police would expect them to be (mother’s house, girlfriend’s house). So they have to sleep on friends’ couches, always ready to duck and dodge.

Again, you need to believe some pretty strong things about police behavior to make this true. The police are so determined to make life miserable for these kids that they have an almost limitless interest in asking neighbors where the kids are staying. They seemingly interrogate everyone so that they can learn about everyone else. Their methods of interrogation turn girlfriends against their boyfriends and children against their parents. The presence of the police, in Goffman’s telling, has done much on its own to destroy the fabric of black community life. No one can trust anyone else. No one can hold down a job without fearing that he’ll be handcuffed and taken away from that job on a moment’s notice, thereby driving many black youth into the underground economy.

It’s a profoundly depressing story with no hopeful upside. Even Goffman’s own return to the white, manicured world of Princeton, New Jersey is fraught; every backfiring engine makes her shriek in anticipation of being shot. Her book reminds me a lot of [book: Gang Leader for a Day], though Goffman inserts herself into the story much more than Venkatesh did. At one point Venkatesh realizes that the Robert Taylor Homes’ residents had all been protecting him without saying so: they’d kept all the really illegal stuff away from him so that he couldn’t incriminate them when, as must inevitably happen, the police asked him what he’d seen. Goffman is so much in the thick of the action that her book is practically begging the police to interrogate her. It’s a very strange book.

I have very mixed feelings about it. Mostly I just want to be convinced that she didn’t make it all up. Then I want to know what to do about it. In a pinch, “end the monumentally destructive war on drugs” will do as a smart policy intervention, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the problem here. There are *so many* problems that you don’t know where to begin. Begin with the war on drugs? Begin with the lack of job opportunities for high-school dropouts? Begin with the difficulty that convicted criminals have getting jobs? Begin with the CompStat focus on quantifiable policing? Goffman avoids a good many of these questions, quite deliberately: her job is to describe this particular community from the inside, not look down on it from the outside. But her book begs for all of these other questions to be answered.

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community — December 14, 2014

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

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Painting of a guy at a bowling alley, the lane stretching out behind him. He is polishing his bowling ball. He is wearing a bowling shirt.

First of all, bowling leagues aren’t even the half of this book. It’s a quite impressive collection of data arguing that, at every level of our society, no matter how you slice the data, Americans are doing less in groups. We’re going out to eat less; we’re playing cards with other people less; we’re (yes) spending less time in bowling leagues; we’re spending less time in clubs; and we’re less civically engaged.

The big picture, of course, is that it’s going to be very hard to prove causality, and there are a million different ways to argue against this. Maybe we’re spending less time with other people because we’re so busy with work. Nope; we actually have somewhat more free time. Maybe people are less economically secure, so they’re doing all they can to just hold onto their money for dear life. Nope; turns out that this is true among the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class.

The argument is incredibly hard to make, so Putnam comes at us with a frankly overwhelming quantity of data. Each datum might, on its own, be open to rebuttal, but the overall effect is that it’s very hard to dispute the sheer volume of examples. Something really significant happened, starting in about 1960, whereby we just stopped spending time in groups.

Putnam ends up concluding that the most significant contributors to this atomization are television, and the aging of the “great civic generation” (i.e., the Greatest Generation). World War II may have brought Americans together civically, and the end of the war meant the end of a great unifier. Whatever the model that explains it, Putnam seems reasonably convinced of the cause: the people who had been civically engaged are dying, and they’re not being replaced. And then there’s television, which tends to focus us in our homes rather than in, say, movie theaters. Television (apart from certain types, like PBS) also tends to be connected to less civic engagement, even apart from its isolating aspects.

The final chapter of these sorts of books is supposed to tell you “now what?” but here there’s really not much of a next step. The civic generation is dying, and people are watching more isolating television. The first isn’t going to change, and the second is unlikely to change. My intuition (based on nothing but, well, my gut) is that sociological behaviors will tend to have a rapidly-increasing/rapidly-decreasing flavor: if everyone around you is playing bridge together on Saturday night, that will seem like a perfectly lovely thing for you to do, too, and you’ll join in; but if no one else is doing it, you won’t, either. So when people stop playing bridge, groups will stop playing it in a hurry. (I hear echoes here of Simon’s paper on skew distributions, but that’s just a hunch. Maybe there’s a power law somewhere in here, or maybe not.) The question is how to bootstrap the rapid increase. Well, how did civic engagement increase rapidly for the Greatest Generation? A war intervened. Wars tend to focus groups.

So maybe the only answer to our civic woes is to enrobe the world in another cleansing fire.

Lie Bot tells Philippe, 'The End! No moral.' and then turns out the light, leaving little Philippe terrified.

Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty —

Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty

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The pages of a book flapping in the breeze, sort of decaying into computer bits

This book ought to be a few essays. One is a very good — devastating, depressing — essay about women in technology in the U.S.; it argues rather clearly that the problem is not that women are less good at math and science, but rather that certain *sociological* facts about men in technology make the U.S. tech industry very masculine, thereby identifying the tech industry with certain virtues prized in certain subsets of the tech world, thereby identifying women *out* of that industry, thereby perpetuating itself. That essay is wonderful and terrible.

The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu Interwoven with the women-in-tech section is a section that ties it to colonialism. This section is brilliant. Essentially: the first refuge of scoundrels is to prematurely universalize their own biases. It’s not that women have been systematically locked out of the temple, you see; it’s that *evolution itself* dictates that they be excluded. It’s not that their British overlords thought Indians inferior and treated them as such, while treating the Indian economy as an extractive agricultural one meant to feed the British industrial maw; no, it was of course that Indians are *by their nature* effeminate, weak, and deservedly on the bottom rung of the racial ladder. (The Chinese are brilliant, but evil.)

I really hoped this section would go somewhere. It didn’t. Indeed, I really hoped this section indicated the thematic direction and scope of the rest of the book: that we would find history, art, coding, misogyny, and colonialism all wrapped together in a devastating package. It wasn’t meant to be.

Chandra also gives us some scattered essays about the act of programming. Those are great — for me, anyway, and for those who have programmed a computer. I don’t think it will be really understandable by those who haven’t programmed, because Chandra doesn’t give enough context for those folks. I don’t know whom this part of the book was aimed at. Those who’ve programmed will nod vigorously at someone who managed to capture their lifestyle in well-chosen prose form, but was Chandra really trying to preach to the choir? Those who’ve not programmed might get some of it, but I have my doubts.

Finally, the plurality of the book is given over to a description of Indian philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. Most of it was, sad to say, lost on me, for the same reasons that I think the programming section will be lost on non-coders: not enough context, and a great many weighty Indian words thrown at the reader without terribly many examples to lodge them in our consciousness.

At the end of the book there’s a halfhearted attempt to tie all of this together, but I don’t think it goes anywhere.

I’d strongly advise reading the first 75 pages or so, then quietly returning it to the library.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History — December 6, 2014

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

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Some sort of coat of arms. Probably the whig party's? Maybe the parliament's?

This is a fun little essay, eye-opening and mind-changing. The whig interpretation of history is one that we’re all familiar with, even if we’re not aware of it: that all of history led up to this moment; that anything which seems to further the advance toward this moment is perceived as positive, while those who opposed the advance to this moment are perceived as standing in the way of history’s great upward march; and that, indeed, history can be perceived as an advance, with our progressive existence being the pinnacle of historical development.

There are many problems with this approach, but the main one is that it allows us to shirk our responsibility toward understanding events as they happened. If (this is the example Butterfield spends the most time on) we perceive the Protestant Reformation as the inevitable toppling of a Catholic Church that had become corrupt and repressive, then we view Martin Luther as a hero, and we view 16th-century popes as necessarily evil and opposed to progress. We follow along this line far enough and we end up with Max Weber telling us that Protestantism is the necessary substrate that allows modern capitalism to exist.

If, instead, we understand Luther as he was, we need to confront the fact that, had he stepped in a time machine and seen the anarchy that the Reformation begat, he would surely have apologized and begged for mercy; the world he sought was one of greater orthodoxy; he surely believed that Catholicism’s problem was insufficient adherence to true belief. There’s nothing inherent in Protestant practice that makes it less rigid or less dogmatic than the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

A historian’s job, according to Butterfield, is to tease out the ways that historical change happens, and to understand the role of historical contingency: but for this chance event, things could have turned out far differently than they did. And the contingencies rest on the actions of men and women who were trying to make the best of the complex, fluid situations they faced. Understanding why they did what they did in the context of their times, and how they contributed to historical change, is the historian’s job — not to interpret yesterday in the light of today.

Butterfield would seem to stand with Karl Popper (he of [book: The Open Society and Its Enemies] fame) in denying the possibility of something called ‘historical law’. One optimistic reason to try to discover these laws is that we can then, presumably, use the past to guide the future. Popper would tell us that there are no such laws. Butterfield would also tell us that there are no such laws, and that the historian’s job isn’t to find them, either. The historian’s job is to develop historical imagination and historical empathy. That job is quite hard enough; anything more is beyond the historian’s competence.

Butterfield wrote his book in 1931, a few years before the final German catastrophe. I can’t help but think that, had he written it 14 years later, he would be more sympathetic to those who see the nightmares of the past and hope desperately to prevent them. He’d probably still think it was a fool’s errand, but there’d maybe be some more gravity to it. [book: The Whig Interpretation of History] was mostly focused on, well, the whigs, and the long-since-concluded battle between Protestants and Catholics; I wonder whether this historiographical fracas seemed important, but fundamentally innocent and remote.

Then again, maybe Butterfield 14 years later would have held up the Nazis as examples in support of his thesis: history is not an ever-upward march, and historical contingencies large or small can lead to unpredictable outcomes.

I don’t know what Butterfield would have said. I could probably research what he said; the man died in 1979. In the absence of that, I could put myself into his shoes and write [book: The World War II Rebuttal To The Whig Interpretation of History].

Tiny Mac suggestion of the evening — November 30, 2014
Questlove on the last killing — November 25, 2014

Questlove on the last killing

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i dont know how to not internalize the overall message this whole trayvon case has taught me:

you aint shit.

that’s the lesson i take from this case.

you aint shit.

those words are deep cause these are words i heard my whole life:

i heard from adults in my childhood that i need to be “about something” other than all that banging and clanging and music i play all the time”….and as i got older i heard i wasn’t as good as “so and so and so and so” is at music. —i mean the “you a’int shit” stories i got—jesus its a wonder i made it.

so…rich asks “wait…you’re not surprised are you?”

i wasn’t surprised at all, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting any less.

i mean i SHOULD be angry right?—i remember when Sean Bell’s outcome came out and i just knew “oh god new york is gonna go up in flames”—and like….noone was fuming…..it was like “shrug….no surprises here….that’s life”

so rich asks: “like are you surprised….that you aint shit”

i meant it hurts to hear it and i said “im not surprised at the disposition but who wants to be reminded?….what fat person wants to hear they aren’t pleasing to the eye. or what addict wants to hear they are a constant effup?—who wants to be reminded that shrug its just the way it is?

so i guess im struggling to get at least 1% of this feeling back from all this protective numbness ive built around me to keep me from feeling because at the end of the day….im still human….

….right?