2012-07-15T11:14:30+00:00

Is there any rational reason to buy books locally?

July 15, 2012/stevereads/1 Comment

There’s a good argument against buying books locally. Consider my beloved local bookstore, the Harvard Book Store. I buy books from them, and I pay a premium to do so — happily, I might add. But a large part of my brain knows that this is irrational. If I want a book, why not buy it where it’s cheapest? It’s one thing to buy something local that is legitimately local and can’t be made by anyone else — for instance, cocktails from Drink or food from Craigie On Main or produce from a CSA that supports local farmers or ice cream from Toscanini’s. Books aren’t at all like that; they’re not local, and a large chunk of my book dollar is going to publishers in New York City. Why not take every penny that I spend at the Harvard Book Store and instead donate it to my local library? Or buy the books on Amazon?

Three answers come to mind:

1. Local bookstores support new authors in a way that Amazon does not. I don’t think there’s much evidence for this, though I’d be glad to hear it if there were. And come to think of it: if you spend less on a given book by buying it where it’s cheapest, you can then *buy more books*, including books by upstart authors. So buying from Amazon might, in this sense, be *better* for new authors.

2. The Harvard Book Store brings speakers to the local community, and in general runs author events locally that Amazon does not. True. But in the absence of local bookstores, wouldn’t this happen anyway? Those authors aren’t coming to the HBS out of community altruism; they’re promoting a book. I assume that they’d continue promoting their books even if HBS weren’t there. Authors like Paul Krugman come to Cambridge because they think that the audience here would buy their books. Krugman would likely continue to do so.

3. A general love of local commerce. Sure, no doubt. But that’s not really what we’re arguing. Hollywood Express had a local video store in Central Square in Cambridge, which went out of business because of (among other things) Netflix and YouTube and Hulu and Vimeo. It was an outmoded business model. The Hollywood Express was replaced by Life Alive, a delightful restaurant whose first outpost was in Lowell. An outmoded business was replaced with a business that still makes sense. If local bookstores don’t make sense, replace them with local businesses that do. It’s not as though the alternative to the Harvard Book Store is the Wal-Martization of Cambridge.

But as I said, I spend a good chunk of money at HBS, and I intend to continue to do so, irrationally or not. Anyone want to convince me that it’s actually rational to spend my dollars at HBS rather than spend less money at Amazon and redirect the surplus to other worthy local businesses?

__P.S.__: Writing this out has really made me question whether I *want to* continue spending money at HBS.

__P.P.S.__: My friend Josh, on Facebook, made a good argument in local bookstores’ favor: they, and local cafés, are places where like like-minded people congregate. If you really love books, you’re likely to buy from a local bookstore rather than, say, from a grocery store. And if you love coffee, you’ll go to a place where others who love coffee go. Josh prefers to support the places that support real lovers of the book (and of the cup). I do, too. This seems like an excellent argument in HBS’s favor.

One counterargument is that this is a temporary state of the world, and that the market always wins. People will increasingly be buying their books on e-readers like Kindles, or from Amazon, so as time goes on fewer and fewer book lovers will buy books from places that self-identify as “book lovers’ retailers”. As the community moves elsewhere, these places lose their character.

But of course that’s a ways off, and in the meantime we should support homes for that kind of community.

A SQL question!

July 11, 2012/stevereads/2 Comments

Suppose you have

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table

It would be syntactically invalid, as far as I understand it, to have

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff,
some_sum + some_diff AS something_else
FROM some_table

, because `some_sum` and `some_diff` aren’t names that yet exist in the scope of that `SELECT` statement. To use `some_sum` and `some_diff`, you need an outer scope that has access to all the names created in the inner scope — so you need either

SELECT some_sum + some_diff AS something_else
FROM
(
SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table
)

or, if you don’t need to attach a name to `some_sum + some_diff`, you can just do

SELECT a+b AS some_sum, a-b AS some_diff
FROM some_table
HAVING some_sum + some_diff >= 0

(or whatever it is that you might want to do with `some_sum + some_diff`)

So … are there some nightmare scenarios that would result from allowing the names ‘`some_sum`’ and ‘`some_diff`’ to be visible in the inner scope? Does anyone know the SQL spec well enough to understand the problem?

__P.S.__: Oh, I think I can answer the question a moment after asking it: the problem is that you can create a name in the inner scope that’s the same as the name of a field in the base table. That is, you can do something like

SELECT 2*a AS a, 3*a AS triple_a
FROM some_table

, and that `3*a` statement is ambiguous: are you referring to triple the *derived* `a`, or triple the *base* `a`?

Even still, I can imagine allowing one scope to refer to a name created within that scope, but then making it a syntax error to introduce a name in a given scope that’s the same as a name in a base table. The way to resolve the ambiguity in this case would be to do

SELECT 2*a AS double_a, 3*(double_a) AS sextuple_a
FROM some_table

I wonder if a Sufficiently Smart Compiler (“a classic argument often pulled out in a LanguagePissingMatch”) could find all ambiguous uses of names, or whether there’s some logical reason why it just couldn’t.

Then again, forbidding the creation of a name in a given scope that is the same as the name of a name in an inner scope or base table would make a lot of common usage impossible. I routinely do

SELECT one_thing, sum(something) something_else
FROM some_table
GROUP BY one_thing

I.e., I’m reusing `something_else` in this scope, even though it also exists in the base table. If I had to constantly use new names for derived fields, just because the derived fields might be referred to in the outer scope, I think I’d find that annoying.

Then, of course, there’s the ever-available argument that it’s just simpler to implement a compiler which imposes certain mild aesthetic constraints on its users.

Affordable Care Act silence is deafening

July 1, 2012/stevereads/Leave a comment

Does it seem to anyone else like Democrats — including the President — passed the Affordable Care Act and then promptly stopped talking about it altogether? If my read on the situation is right, that’s because they perceived the law polls very poorly. But

1. If you’re going to lose an election, lose with your back straight. Either voters dislike your voting for the law or they don’t. If they don’t care how you voted, there’s no need for you to be silent about it. On the other hand, if they dislike it, and you believed in the law when you passed it, then stand up for it. You didn’t run for office just to win re-election; presumably you ran because you wanted to achieve something positive, and you thought the law was positive. If the voters do care and you didn’t believe in it when it was passed, your opponent is still going to hound you for your vote when you run for re-election. So what’s the point in hiding from it?

2. Whether something polls well or poorly isn’t an objective fact ‘out there’ in the universe; whether it polls well depends a lot on whether people whom Americans like — such as President Obama — are out there selling it. Which they aren’t.

3. The ACA as such polls poorly, because it’s been demonized as ‘Obamacare’. But some of the individual provisions — no discrimination against pre-existing conditions, lengthened coverage under one’s parents’ health insurance — poll well. In many cases I think it’s just that people don’t know what’s in Obamacare. In other cases, like the mandate, people genuinely seem to hate it. That seems like a failure of education: people need to understand that there are only a few ways to make health coverage universal without the market unraveling. Democrats have been *terrible* about selling the mandate.

4. Do you care about ensuring that everyone has health insurance, or don’t you? We really need to make clear that that’s what this comes down to: we believe in universal coverage; they don’t. If you believe in universal coverage, something like a mandate is unavoidable. (Expanding Medicare to everyone would have been another option, but insurers never would have stood for it.) Lately Republicans seem to be facing up to this, and at least admitting that they don’t care about universal coverage. If nothing else, that has the virtue of consistency. But it’s morally repugnant.

Tools for making the impossible possible

January 29, 2012/stevereads/Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tools that help make the difficult easy, which has got me thinking again about probably my favorite quote of all time, by A.N. Whitehead:

> It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

I think about this at work all the time, because our use of SQL makes possible a lot of data-gathering and -analysis tasks which really would have been impossible without it. Answering some question about many thousands of servers (100,770 as of the end of September, 2011) would be unimaginable. Certainly getting many *quick* answers to many *quick* queries would be absolutely unimaginable. Without some tool that allows quick aggregation across many different datasets, we’d have to resort to home-brewed scripts that, say, ssh to thousands of machines in parallel and ask them questions. Or we’d have to reinvent Query, more likely.

There are two aspects to SQL that I think about constantly at work: first this trick of turning an impossible problem into a triviality, and second the sense of *playfulness* that it enables. It takes only a tiny bit more effort to turn from the question you were trying to answer into something unexpected, something more general, or something more nuanced. Often answering questions that you didn’t know you had involves finding a table you didn’t know the company published, which in turn involves asking around to see who would know best about a given kind of data. Finding answers to questions you didn’t know you had seems to me part and parcel of what SQL is all about.

The term “generative technology” gets at this. I would link to the first Google search result for this, except that I don’t really like how Jonathan Zittrain — who is, in fairness, most associated with this term — runs with it. iPhones versus non-iPhones isn’t really at all related to what I have in mind here, and I don’t think the definition he has there gets at what even he means by it. The term “generative” comes ultimately from generative grammar, which my non-linguistically-trained self understands to mean “a set of simple rules for the formation of sentences, which rules can be combined in infinitely many ways to construct infinitely many distinct sentences.” In mathematics, think of axioms and rules for their combination: there aren’t that many axioms defining the integers, but they can be combined with only a few more rules (about ordered pairs and what, exactly, multiplication of two ordered pairs means) to build rational numbers, and thence real numbers, and thence complex numbers. The simple axioms, and simple rules for their combination, lead to infinitely complex objects.

(Because I cannot resist a filthy quote when given the opportunity, it’s here that I’ll quote Stephen King’s advice on writing: ‘When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.’)

And so it is with SQL and other generative technologies. They don’t give you a single product that you use in the 10 or 20 or 100 ways that you’ve been told to use it; in this sense, I view Facebook as non-generative. A generative technology, like Unix or SQL, might have a steep learning curve, but once you’ve learned it you can do infinitely many things.

There are lots of complexities once you’ve learned the atoms, and even once you’ve learned how to combine the atoms. In Unix, for instance, your first task is learning to string together programs with pipes. Once you’ve done that, you’ll soon enough be writing your own programs. but you have to write them in the Unix Way, which often involves allowing them to sit with a pipe on their left side and a pipe on their right; in this way, they themselves become part of the generative toolkit. Again, invoking Whitehead, the point is to make complicated action reflexive and doable without thinking. Take a common Unix pattern:

[some commands] | sort | uniq | sort -nr

This takes the output of [some commands] — assumed to contain one interesting pattern per line — and displays it in descending order of frequency, with the frequency in the left column and the pattern on the right. This isn’t many characters, so typing it out becomes second nature; the smart thing to do, though, would be to put this Unix fragment in its own script, which we might call sort_by_pop (or really ‘popsort’, which would save you some keystrokes: there’s already a command that starts with ‘sort’, but no commands that start with ‘pops’, so ‘popsort’ would be easier to get from tab-completion; Unix people think this way):

(19:44 -0500) slaniel@example.com~$ cat sort_by_pop
#!/bin/bash
sort |uniq -c |sort -nr

Now you can just pipe things through sort_by_pop if you want to sort them by popularity:

(19:44 -0500) slaniel@example.com:~$ grep -o ‘^[^ ]+’ access.log |sort_by_pop |head
607 46.165.197.141
520 173.242.125.206
309 199.21.99.67
229 130.195.253.1
169 66.249.71.18
162 72.14.199.102
83 72.246.0.10
37 142.167.21.94
34 198.228.223.217
33 80.58.205.47

Hm, what’s that grep(1) bit? Looks like that bit of script could be usefully abstracted into something called ‘get_ip’:

(19:48 -0500) slaniel@example.com:~$ cat get_ip
#!/bin/bash
grep -o ‘^[^ ]+’

whence we simplify to “cat access.log | get_ip | sort_by_pop”. Now you don’t need to understand the nuances of how sort(1) and uniq(1) work if you don’t want to; in fact, you may never need to know that those atomic tools are sitting underneath your molecular abstractions. If you trust the person who wrote the tools, you can assume that get_ip gets an IP address from a suitably formatted Apache access log, and that sort_by_pop sorts a file containing one pattern per line in descending order of popularity.

And so forth. The idea is to constantly combine the atoms of your knowledge into larger and larger molecules, which allows you to forget about the individual atoms unless you really need them. (Where you often need to remember the atoms is for performance reasons.)

In SQL, one way of combining atoms into higher-order molecules is by means of views. A view is a new table (“relation” for the relational-calculus purists in the room) constructed from lower-order “base tables”. There may be some very clever way to get by without views, but I don’t know what it might be. Often you’ll end up with a query that requires you to join one complicated sub-query to itself; without views, you’d be repeating the sub-query, which would probably involve copying and pasting a bunch of text. This would make editing one of the sub-queries a hassle, because you’d have to repeat your edits once for every sub-query. With views, you create the view once, give it some shorthand name, then use the shorthand on every subsequent reference. Any edit only has to happen once, in the view. Again, the point is to make higher-order thought effortless.

(Java, by contrast, requires so much boilerplate that it gets in the way of quickly scanning a piece of code and understanding what it’s trying to do. Either that, or it requires the developer to carefully shunt his boilerplate off into a little boilerplate area of his code. Or it requires the code reader to develop a finely honed skill of skipping over boilerplate. One organizing principle for writing code of any sort ought to be that it puts the least possible distance between the task you’re envisioning and the code you write for it.)

Having developed such a love for SQL, and having long ago learned how to build high-order castles in Unix, I’m now on the hunt for other generative technologies that will make difficult tasks possible. My goal for 2012 is to discover such a set of technologies for time series. It’s not just a matter of writing formulas that allow me to manipulate time series in any way I see fit, though that’s hard enough (it will probably involve R, and may also involve [book: Data Analysis with Open Source Tools], recommended in the highest terms by my awesome friend Dan Milstein). And it’s not just a matter of manipulating them in a way that makes exploring them, combining them, and being surprised possible, though that’s part and parcel of the generative idea.

Rather, the difficulty with making these things work right starts, it seems to me, way down in the guts. Akamai’s Query system is brilliant — one of the most brilliant technologies I’ve ever seen at a company, central to everything I do at every minute of every day — and works so well because there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood which, again, I mostly don’t need to think about. The low levels do break, just as they do in any software system (all abstractions are leaky); and when they break, I’m forcibly reminded that all my simplifying abstractions rest very tentatively on a lot of lower-level foundations. Without someone doing a lot of low-level grunt work, Whitehead’s dictum doesn’t hold. (Perhaps the grandest abstractions of all in the modern world are “the market economy” and “industrial democracy” — abstractions that we forget are based on very concrete things like cheap fossil fuels or policemen who will enforce contracts at the point of a gun.) In the case of SQL, someone has to build a backend data-storage method that allows quick lookups. In the case of time series, what will the backend storage system look like? Will we need something like MapReduce? Do we need a different high-level language to concisely encapsulate high-level time-series concepts like “the trend component” or “the spectrum”?

Here is the place to note a lesson that I find I have to repeat to myself over and over: don’t think any harder than you need to. My interest in time series is very non-abstract; I have some specific questions I want to answer about some specific datasets at work. And yes, I want to make sure that I can combine them in new and interesting ways in a reasonable amount of time. But until I’ve asked a single specific question of a single specific dataset, I shouldn’t think too hard about making an apple pie from scratch.

So anyway, there’s a general point in here, and a specific one. The general point is to hunt for abstractions that make it possible to get a lot done without thinking, and make it possible to explore areas you didn’t even know you *could* explore. The specific point is that in 2012, I want to see what I can do with Akamai’s time-series data. I imagine one of these points will be interesting to you, the other less so.

Because Backbar, in Somerville’s Union Square, is remarkably un-webbable, I give the world this

December 31, 2011/stevereads/Leave a comment

Backbar, in the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville, is on Facebook, but I’ll be danged if I can find their website through any combination of reasonable search terms. So let’s try this:

* Backbar is on the web.

* You can find directions to Backbar, and even a map!

Perhaps this will do some good. I see that the indispensable Boston Restaurant Talk included Backbar’s URL, but for some reason didn’t actually provide the link.

College is really, really worth your money

October 24, 2011/stevereads/6 Comments

A discussion flared up on Facebook based around this article by Michael Ellsberg in the [newspaper: New York Times] whose premise is that college isn’t worth the money, and that we’d be better off encouraging entrepreneurship.

I happen to have been looking recently at the data on this. Let me give you a spoiler: it’s not even close. It’s worth the debt load. Here are the numbers:

* Median income for males with bachelor’s degrees, 2010: $55,038 (does not count those with *more than* a bachelor’s degree, like doctors or lawyers)

* Median for males with associates degrees: $40,918

* Median for males with some college, no degree: $36,082

* Median for males who graduated from high school or got a GED: $30,232

(I could obviously include numbers for women in here, too. I’m leaving them out only for brevity’s sake.)

The mean incomes are similar, but even more striking:

* College degree, 2010, male: $70,567
* High-school degree or equivalent, 2010, male: $36,755

To dramatize this a bit, imagine I grabbed two men at random and asked them their incomes. The probability that the randomly selected college-educated male is earning more than the randomly selected high-school-educated male is about 74%. [1]. I imagine that if I ran a similar simulation — whereby I simulate our two graduates after each has worked for 40 years, and add up their accumulated earnings — that the results would be even more stark.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has already done that work for me. On a quick scan, I can’t find “work-life earnings” for all males, so I’ll just compare white males. Over the course of his working life, a college-educated white male (specifically one with a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree, a professional degree, or a Ph.D.) will have earned about $2.3 million. His high-school-educated white-male partner will have earned $1.2 million.

I repeat: it’s not even close. It’s *so* not even close that I consider it irresponsible in the extreme for Ellsberg to cherry-pick some success stories (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) and imply that students should strive to be like them, rather than encouraging them to take a rather more sure route to success. Had Ellsberg encouraged students, instead, to skip college and aim to be professional sports players, I hope we’d all be deeply offended. The piece he actually did write is no less offensive.

__P.S. (25 October 2011)__: as various commenters have pointed out, this only shows correlation; it doesn’t show causation. It could well be that the people who have the drive to get a college degree are the same as those who have the drive to earn a lot of income — and that they’d earn a high income even without the college degree. It would be interesting to compare the lifetime earnings of those who got into college but chose not to go with those who got into college and went. I’ll see if I can find any interesting data in this direction later.

[1] — This is just an estimate. It’s based on a simplifying assumption, namely that the probability distribution of incomes is approximately lognormal (i.e., that the logarithm of income follows a Gaussian [bell-shaped] distribution). That assumption, combined with the estimated means and medians from the links above, gives the 74% number.

Thanks to Cosma Shalizi for pointing me to a simple approximation to the true income distribution, and noting how I could go from the estimated means and medians to an estimated probability.

Accounting gripes and the tyranny of trillions (part of an occasional series)

October 16, 2011/stevereads/Leave a comment

Matt Yglesias makes the entirely correct point that We Underinvest In Infrastructure Because We Overinvest In War, Health Care, And Low Taxes, along the way noting the various estimates of how much we need to be spending over the next N years on bridges, roads, and whatever else. Various organizations give us various numbers:

> All of the numbers are so gargantuan large that theyre useless when youre trying to communicate with the public, said Roy Kienitz, undersecretary for policy at the Department of Transportation.
>
> The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that an investment of $1.7 trillion is needed between now and 2020 to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the ends of their planned life cycles. The Urban Institute puts the price tag at $2 trillion.

The fact that these numbers are so gargantuan is exactly why we shouldn’t be talking about them in raw terms. $2 trillion is an essentially unfathomable number. So let’s try it some other ways:

The IRS collected about $2.3 trillion in fiscal year 2009, across personal income taxes, corporate taxes, Social Security taxes, the estate (“death”) tax, Medicare part A, various excise taxes, and so forth. Individual U.S. states collected about $704 billion in 2010, of which 33.5% was income tax and a bit less was sales tax. Federal and state taxes altogether, then, come to about $3 trillion. So our $2 trillion infrastructure investment is about 2/3 of the country’s total tax bill. (The $3 trillion tax bill, to put that in some more perspective, comes out of a $14 trillion GDP. Taxes come to about 21% of GDP, in other words.)

U.S. 10-year Treasurys are available at historically low rates right now — right around 2.5%. So let’s say the government borrowed $2 trillion today, and paid it off at 2.5% over the next ten years. How much would the monthly payment come to? (There is probably a lot of complexity about government financing that I don’t understand, but I’m treating this exactly like a mortgage with a 2.5% interest rate. Feel free to correct me if there’s some important nuance I’m missing.)

The monthly payment, it turns out, would be about $18.8 billion. This is getting more fathomable. And while the various governments’ $3 trillion in receipts come from many classes of tax levied on many different types of people and businesses, let’s just simplify and say that there are 144.1 million taxpayers — which is the number of individual Federal income-tax returns. How much will each of those taxpayers have to pay every month to ensure that our bridges don’t collapse in a decade? The answer: $18.8 billion per month divided by 144.1 million taxpayers, or $130.43 per month.

Now *that* is a number I can understand. The cost of ensuring a non-crumbling infrastructure is $130.43 per person per month. How much of an increase is that over what we pay now? Well, we pay a total of $3 trillion per year, or a quarter-trillion per month, or about $1,731 per return per month. $130.43 is a 7.5% increase over what we pay now.

I can wrap my head around “my tax bill will increase by 7.5%.” The story gets even rosier if you consider that investors are currently willing to lend the Federal government money to be paid off in 30 years for about 3%. That lowers the monthly payment to about $60 per person, which is about a 3.5% increase in overall taxes.

All of this assumes, recall, that every dime of the $2 trillion would be new money — money that we wouldn’t spend anyway. That is obviously false: if a bridge collapses, we’ll presumably repair it. And presumably there’s a lot of roadwork that we’d already be doing. But assuming it’s all new money, the average tax bill would go up by somewhere between 3.5% and 7.5%. I can wrap my head around the concept “my tax bill will increase by 5%,” much more than I can wrap it around “$2 trillion over the next decade.”

Note also that, if we somehow managed to get a lot of high-income people into this country, we could lower the per-person expense even more. What counts as “affordable” depends to a great extent upon how many people live in this country, because “per-person expense” has both a numerator and a denominator. There are two obvious ways to get more high-income people into this country: either (1) allow in any immigrant who has an employer to sponsor him or is looking to get a Ph.D., or (2) encourage native-born Americans to have more babies. Ideas for how to make either (1) or (2) happen will have to occupy another post at another time.

Trillions are unfathomable, so it’s important to find some way to put them in context to make them fathomable. Switching from aggregates to per-capita numbers is one quick way. Switching from “costs over ten years” to “cost per person per month” is another way. Percentages are another good measure: percent of GDP, say, or percent of current tax revenues. Otherwise we get stuck in massive-number fatigue, which helps no one (except maybe the political party which takes terrorizing you over the budget as its reason for being).

The weakness of retrospective conservatism

September 17, 2011/stevereads/Leave a comment

I don’t know why I made the mistake of reading David Brooks. This is a mistake that I’ve avoided making for *so long*. Why must I make it now?

Anyway, I’ll be quick. Brooks’s point is basically that people expect their government to do massive social engineering and do it well, and that they should rather expect it to fail: the systems government is engineering are just too massive to engineer them well. This is by way of telling us that government isn’t going to get us out of this recession, and that it’s foolhardy to expect that.

Let’s imagine it had gone the other way: Alan Greenspan had jacked up interest rates to prick the housing bubble a few years back, or any number of regulatory steps had been taken to tighten lending standards. Then Brooks would have nothing to talk about today.

Or go back to Hurricane Katrina. There were various conservative pundits, solemnly averring that the government’s disastrous response was just proof that central planning never works, and that people should never expect to get any help from anyone but themselves and their families. But had the government — at all levels — done its job, we never would have heard them claiming that this was proof of the government’s wisdom.

If we want to talk about the failures of central planning, let’s talk about war, or the DoD. There could be nothing more centralized, more hierarchical, or more literally regimented than the U.S. military — yet this is supposed to be why conservatives are all about the military. It’s a killing machine precisely because it is focused, like a massive machine, on the task of destroying other militaries.

So do we see David Brooks shaking his head from side to side as he sighs, telling us that war is not the answer because central planning never works? The closest we get to that is an apology, after the fact, for having supported the invasion of Iraq.

The best we can say, then, is that Brooks has learned his lesson, and will never again support conservative-friendly centralized government projects; he’ll be just as intolerant of conservative government causes as he is of liberal ones. We’ll just see about that.

H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

August 24, 2011/stevereads/Leave a comment

Black-and-white (though maybe with some bluish tones in the background) photo of Roosevelt, his teeth clamped down on a cigarette holder with a cigarette in it. The book's title is in rather scripty blue. Subtitle is in white. Author's name is also in white.

Delightful read. My main concern when reading a book like this is that it’s going to be fawning, and will subscribe to the retrospective superhero status that its subject has attained. Brands couldn’t avoid that entirely here, of course (he chose to write about FDR, so I have to imagine he doesn’t loathe the man), but he’s just about as forthright about the man as he could be.

Most everyone knows the FDR story by now, but maybe it’s worthwhile to briefly reveal the highlights. Scion of the Roosevelt clan, Teddy Roosevelt his fifth cousin. Assistant secretary of the navy during World War I. Crippled below the waist by polio and confined to a wheelchair for much of his life. Governorship of New York. Elected president in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression after booting Hoover from office. Took the country off the gold standard. Closed the country’s banks during his first week in office. First 100 days created the New Deal. Domestic program foundered on his court-packing scheme, though it may have eventually helped him by holding a gun up to the Supreme Court’s head. Then Pearl Harbor, World War II, re-elected 3 times, and dead just months before the end of the war.

What a book like this brings to its subject is style, rather than much new information. Brands’s style is to let the subjects speak mostly for themselves: the ratio of quoted words to narrated words must be north of 1:1. Yet Brands stitches the quotes together effortlessly; it’s as though the characters themselves, and not Brands, were walking me through their lives.

Far from being fawning, I felt like Brands’s take on FDR’s leadership was slightly ambiguous. On many occasions — particularly whether to invade Europe through the north of France or the south of Italy first — it felt as though FDR sat quietly and hemmed and hawed until forced to make a decision. Sometimes his dithering may have served a strategic point: wait for someone else to make the first move, but steer their move so that they feel like they had more choice in the matter than they actually did. Other times he really did seem indecisive.

FDR left behind so little writing (in contrast to Churchill) that Brands often has to scrape around to describe the man’s inner life or his relations with others. The scraping occasionally goes too far, as when Brands describes what “must have” gone through FDR’s head. No one knows what must have gone through his head. No harm in speculation, but it’s just that.

Perhaps others already knew about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s relationship. I did not. In fact, I didn’t know a thing about Eleanor. She’s a thread weaving throughout the biography of FDR, of course, in spite of FDR’s best efforts. He cheated on her from early on with Lucy Mercer, who was actually with him on the day he died and slipped away before the press could find out; Mercer may well have been the love of FDR’s life. His and Eleanor’s union was a loveless marriage of convenience that would have ended in divorce soon after she discovered the Mercer affair, had Eleanor not known that divorce would end Franklin’s career. So they stayed together, under the stipulation (whether this is a known fact or just a strong suspicion of Brands’s, I don’t remember) that they would never have sex again, and that essentially they would lead two separate lives. FDR continued his rise to the presidency, and Eleanor slowly escaped from the painful shyness that had enveloped her throughout her youth. By the end of Franklin’s life, Eleanor was a powerful public figure in her own right. FDR dominates the book as a world-historical figure, of course, but Eleanor is the more captivating person.

The title suggests that the book has more focus than it does. [book: Traitor to His Class] doesn’t answer — or even come very close to answering — why a man from such exalted beginnings would care about the little people whom capitalism had steamrolled. It’s not clear that the book even tried to answer this — unlike, say, Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, whose organizing question is: why did a man who was so famous as a power-hungry political ball-buster do so much for people who could do nothing to aid his rise, *particularly* after he’d reached the summit? [book: Traitor to His Class] isn’t like that; it’s a straightforward, and straightforwardly enjoyable, biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest men.

Steve Reads

Author: stevereads