2010-11-06T12:19:15+00:00

Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

November 6, 2010/stevereads/5 Comments

The author looks at the camera. He's Indian and looks kind of tough, but he's also clean-cut with a nice haircut. He's a handsome fellow. He's wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up. Behind him is a bombed-out inner-city neighborhood

The greatest danger of a book like this is that it could become catastrophe tourism — the sort of book that you read, then recite to your friends with excessive condescending blinking that says, “Yeah, it’s real tough out there in the shit, man.” Fortunately, [book: Gang Leader for a Day] is very much not like that. The author himself also isn’t trying to impress you with the friends he made in the gang, and he removes himself as much as possible from the story. That story is about the people living in the projects; the author only appears when he explains — always briefly — how he got the access he did.

Venkatesh entered graduate school in sociology at the University of Chicago in the early 90s, he tells us, and rapidly found himself dissatisfied with the rarefied, high-level statistical approach to understanding groups of people. In order to feel that he knew something about these groups, he had to get to know actual people. So off he goes to the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes, on the south side of Chicago. He walks into one of the homes, and just happens to run into a charismatic gang leader named JT. JT is central to the rest of the book: he shows Venkatesh how gangs work at the lowest levels, he eventually introduces Venkatesh to the very wealthy men at the top of the Chicago gang pyramid, and — as the title suggests — he lets Venkatesh “run” the gang for a day.

Let’s back up a little bit, though. The remarkable thing about this introduction is how short it is: there’s only a few pages between the start of the book and when Venkatesh starts spending serious time with JT. A more self-absorbed author would have spent lots of time laboring over the start of grad school, and would have even celebrated his remarkable stroke of luck at happening upon JT so quickly. But no: Venkatesh is in a hurry to tell us about the people he met. He’s got a heck of a story to tell, so he dives right in.

The eventually goal of his Ph.D. dissertation was to map out how the underground economy in the projects works. Central to that economy is the utter failure of official institutions to support a humane life. I would say that Venkatesh “portrays” the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) as hopelessly corrupt and inept, if it weren’t, instead, that Venkatesh takes this as a basic fact of life. Everyone in the book knows that the CHA is a massive scam, and besides: the book offers endless examples of its criminality. Why bother arguing a point when you can instead show its obvious truth?

The folks living in the projects know, for instance, that the CHA will never replace the front doors to their apartments if those doors get busted down. On freezing, windy, snowy Chicago winter days, with the homeless and the drug-addicted squatting in the hallways, the missing doors can be fatal. Here’s where the gang, and Ms. Bailey (the grand dame of her swath of the Robert Taylor Homes) move in. Favors get traded: the CHA and Ms. Bailey have an I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine policy going, someone knows someone else, someone else owns a spare door, someone else can offer a temporary apartment while the one’s getting repaired.

There are shootings and stabbings all over the place, but no one expects that the police will come investigate them. There are rumors, in fact, that a crooked cop forced one of the project’s women to perform oral sex on him in front of her boyfriend. The police are mostly not the projects’ friends: they stay away when they’re needed, and abuse the residents when they do stop by.

There’s no legal support for the poor folks there. The CHA provides almost no housing support. Upwards of 90% of the projects’ residents are unemployed; those who do manage to get an education and a job leave and never come back. … Well, except for JT: he left the projects, got a business degree, and returned to a managerial role within the Black Knights gang. I couldn’t help but picture Stringer Bell from [film: The Wire] playing the role of JT, almost from the start of the book.

In fact, I couldn’t help imagining [film: The Wire] as a film adaptation of [book: Gang Leader for a Day]. The guiding idea behind [film: The Wire] is that there aren’t good guys and bad guys; there are just forces operating on everyone from above and below. You do certain things to placate your boss at your company, and your boss is doing things to placate his. Go up a few levels, and the CEO is trying to get what he wants, subject to the whims of his board and the stockholders. Turns out the same thing is true in the Robert Taylor Homes: JT and the other managers are trying to keep their gang wars as quiet and contained and predictable as possible, because there’s nothing the police hate more than unpredictable violence that spills beyond the confines of the projects. CHA employees don’t need to demand the occasional sexual favor from Taylor Homes residents, but everyone knows that nothing’s going to get done if those favors aren’t forthcoming. (There’s a lot of casual prostitution in the Homes. It’s not a job; it’s a response to a pressure.)

Of course Venkatesh is subject to his own pressures. He has to get out a Ph.D. thesis. And it takes him a while to realize that he should consult a lawyer: he can’t watch over the illegal activities of a drug-selling gang without eventually inviting a police inquiry. In a really astonishing passage, he realizes that everyone else within the Homes has known this from the start. From the start, they’ve been keeping the really incriminating stuff away from him. Everyone other than Venkatesh is aware of the [film: Wire]-like world they’re living in.

Which makes sense, of course: most of the book’s readers live in a world with well-regulated, formally contracted transactions between well-behaved actors. Things break; we get them repaired. We hear gunshots, we call the cops, the cops come. Enough middle-class white people band together to make the South End a nice place, and eventually it works out. Ours is a world where everything functions more or less as it should. Peel back just a layer or two, though, and you lay bare the [foreign: quid pro quo] underlying it all. Informal institutions subject to their own rules govern everything, because the formal institutions have utterly failed. (This book makes economics look comical. Economics often studies only rigorously formalizable contracts; it’s as though medicine only studied diseases that aren’t cancer.)

I can’t recommend [book: Gang Leader For A Day] highly enough. Like [book: Common Ground], it ends up speaking larger truths by never wavering in affection for its subjects. This affection translates into a relentless need to portray them honestly, warts and all. It’s a triumph of storytelling.

The modern world is interesting for reasons other than the Internet

October 20, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

William F. Buckley, chin held way up, looking thoughtful with his hands near his chin in some sort of weird 'wait, how did your hand end up in that position?' kind of posture Jessa Crispin linked via Twitter to a piece about novelists’ difficulty talking about the Internet. Should their characters be like a lot of us, constantly switching between Facebook, Twitter, email, phone calls, text messages, and the rest? Should their books deliberately *avoid* writing about those things, and instead focus on (here I adopt a Brahmin chin tilted 30 degrees up from the horizontal; imagine Bill Buckley saying this) “the eternal present”?

Listen, the Internet is important. Many of us spend a lot of our time on it. But we spend a lot of our time doing lots of other things, too. How about focusing on rampant job insecurity, for instance? How about focusing on what happens when people lose jobs and realize that there’s virtually no social safety net left?

I’m not saying that writing has any obligation to be socially relevant; it doesn’t. As a practical matter, writers only have an obligation to do what pays the bills. (Or not! They might not be able to make money writing, so they do whatever else they need to do to pay the bills, like sling lattes at Starbucks while they write on the side.)

What I *am* saying, though, is that we have a tendency — either when we look at the world we live in now, or at former worlds — to focus on one detail and obsessively assert that That’s What Everyone Spent All Their Time Thinking About. Look at slavery, for instance: it’s really hard to read about the era between the signing of the Constitution and the Civil War without getting this picture of everyone just counting the days until society was torn apart by war. Or England from the late 18th century through the mid-19th: there’s this picture of people toiling away in the dark Satanic mills and thinking nonstop about What Industrialization Meant when they weren’t Suffering The Ill Effects of Industrialization. Surely these things were important — world-historical, even — but so were lots of other things.

And in the grand scheme of modern living, the Internet is *time-consuming*, but it’s not at all clear that it’s *important*. Spending time with your family is important. Getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising are important. Not needing to drink yourself to sleep at night is important. Inasmuch as work-related stress impinges on all of these things, work is very important. Facebook is not important.

So why are there so many more stories and essays about the effect of the modern media environment on fiction writing than there are about the effect of job insecurity? David Foster Wallace, for instance, spent just about his entire career obsessing over television’s and the web’s effect on fiction writing: his essay “E Unibus Plurum” [sic], which was included in [book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again]; [book: Infinite Jest] itself (about a movie so addicting that you’d sacrifice anything to keep watching it); an essay or two in [book: Consider the Lobster]; and a good fraction of the post-[book: Infinite Jest] interview with Wallace in [book: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself] focus on the media. Wallace is considered an “important writer” largely on that basis.

Where are the people writing novels about job insecurity? It sounds a little silly when phrased that way; no one would really want to read that. But it’s not clear, stated abstractly, that anyone would want to read a novel about the effects of television on American [foreign: ennui], but there you have the shortest possible description of [book: Infinite Jest].

Hypothesis: Wallace’s fiction — and all other fiction coming from people who obsess more about the media environment than they do about the rest of life — appeals more to urbane single dudes in their 20s and 30s, whose biggest concern is that they use Twitter too much, than it does to folks who are having trouble making ends meet.

Then again, the last piece of fiction I can remember reading from someone who was self-consciously trying to Engage With The People was George Packer’s [book: Central Square], about my beloved neighborhood. I give Packer credit for trying, but that book was condescending, as virtually all of Packer’s writing since then has been. (Though you really, really, really need to read his [book: Blood of the Liberals].) Condescension may be inevitable when you’re deliberately trying to make a point through your fiction; you engage in telling rather than showing.

So maybe the idea should be: don’t write a novel that tries to talk about income inequality, or talk about job insecurity, or talk about the pernicious effects of Angry Birds. Just write a novel that respects its characters enough to depict them honestly, and hope that anything you want to say will emerge naturally from that. When I find such a novel, I’ll let you know.

On the virtues of heterodoxy: a pompous blog-post title in response to a pseudonymous blogger

October 14, 2010/stevereads/6 Comments

(__Attention-conservation notice__: 1,600 words on why it may be a good idea not to read cranks. Also some words on academic orthodoxy. Scattered thoughts on building institutions for seeking the truth.)

My friend, who blogs pseudonymously and will hereafter be known as “PB” (for Pseudonymous Blogger), takes me to task for suggesting the existence of cranks. (Note that I didn’t dismiss any specific people out of hand.) PB has long invited me to read the heterodox folks that he follows, including some “with a large collection of old John Birch Society literature.” As my readers know, I tend to read more from the academic wing; PB attacks academia like so:

> Academics in the social science to do not get fired or demoted if they get things wrong. They do not get additional grad students if they are right. The grad school and peer review process reward one thing – conforming to the current intellectual fashions.

I believe I’ve heard about other places where leaders reward servants less for their objective correctness and more for hewing to what the leaders believe. I believe that’s called *every single human institution ever*.

I tease. If the problem is as PB describes, it’s an institutional incentives problem, and the question is how to build better institutions. Think of the various institutions we have in this world whose purpose is (ostensibly, anyway) to seek out truth. We have juries, to find truth in the legal realm; academia, to find it within more abstract domains; the media, to find what our leaders are hiding and bring policies to the broader public; and many others. Every one of them is guilty in some way of confirmation bias. Cass Sunstein, who’s now the head of OIRA, is famous for documenting how groups of people who believe the same things and only speak with one another are likely to arrive at a more-extreme conclusion than if they had some dissenters in their midst. He’s also famous for taking this line of research and using it to suggest that the Internet needs “general-interest intermediaries”, like the [newspaper: New York Times] and the [newspaper: Wall Street Journal], to help soothe society’s emergent extremism. Of course it’s an open question whether the general-interest intermediaries serve the purpose that he thinks they do.

PB focuses on a couple successes from his heterodox sources, but recall the proverb about stopped clocks. The question is how well an institution works overall. We statisticians talk about “type I” and “type II” errors, or “false positives” and “false negatives,” respectively. A false positive, in the context that PB and I are talking about, is when you identify something as true when it’s false; a false negative is when you identify something as false when it’s true. Suppose, for instance, that I adopt as a decision rule that I will never read anything written by someone who’s been a member of the KKK. I may well reject some smart writers because my rule is too crude; these would be false negatives. The basis for my rule is that I expect most of what the KKK member utters to be false; by rejecting KKK writers out of hand, I’m trying to minimize my rate of false positives (again, accepting something as true when it’s in fact false). There are costs associated with false positives, and costs associated with false negatives. To compute the total expected cost of a decision rule, multiply the cost of a false positive by the probability of a false positive, and add to it the cost of a false negative times the probability of a false negative. Going along these lines eventually gets you to the Neyman-Pearson Lemma, which is fundamental to statistics.

Rejecting too many people as cranks may give you a high rate of type-II errors: you may reject some good people out of hand. If PB’s right, mis-labeling cranks is *also* likely to give you too high a rate of type-I errors: you’re just confirming the conventional wisdom, which has a terrible track record. If I’m reading PB right, then, his claim is that academia’s error rate is terrible in both directions, hence “dominated” in the game-theoretic sense. My response would be twofold: first, find me an institution that balances type-I and type-II errors better than academia. This isn’t a rhetorical question; if there is such an institution, I’d like to find it. But the point is not to focus on isolated instances where someone predicted something better than someone else; the point is to look at overall error rates in both directions. Second, I’d ask PB to suggest institutional improvement that would make academia — or juries, or the media, or pick-your-favorite-institution — do its job better.

Based on what PB wrote, I suspect we’d both look for changes in the incentive structure. If it’s empirically true that academia hires on the basis of confirming what the incumbents already believe, how do we change that? To pick one example out of the air: is there any way to make academics put their money where their mouths are? The examples PB cites from macroeconomics, for instance … is there any way to make Ben Bernanke suffer financially if the economy goes south and benefit if GDP rises? You can look to what corporations do — stock options, for instance — to put some skin in the game, but we also know all the sorts of gaming that go along with those incentives. Unless you structure them properly, you have the epidemic of “I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone.” Structuring incentives is an incredibly nontrivial problem. To pick but one book on the subject out of the air, take a look at [book: Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy]. Or, from another angle, read Herbert Simon’s paper on “The Proverbs of Administration”, wherein Simon notes that most every managerial proverb has an equal and opposite proverb that gets thrown around just as confidently.

So in short, I’m not at all confident in my ability to construct incentives that reward the right behavior within institutions, and I certainly don’t feel as though, if I were made Dictator of Academia, I could build better incentives than those that are already in place.

Also, I’m fairly convinced that PB is just empirically wrong about the ideological homogeneity of academia. I think he may be confusing what happens *within one institution* with what happens *in the academy as a whole*. Does PB really contend that the University of Chicago and Princeton University are hiring the same economists? No, of course not: they argue bitterly. Just look at Princeton’s Nobel laureate Paul Krugman denouncing the U of C’s Nobel laureate Ed Prescott. Or look at a good century of arguing in statistics over whether we ought to be Bayesians or frequentists. And that’s in statistics, where empirical and mathematical confirmation are, at least in principle, much more readily available than in the social sciences or the humanities. I’m curious what PB’s standard for homogeneity is. Are academic disciplines homogeneous whenever they avoid pistols at dawn?

If academia is argumentative, it may well be so because the incentives encourage it. Judge Richard Posner, in [book: Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline], argues that academics have every incentive to be contentious — at least within the public sphere — because it gets you attention when you reject the status quo. I see very few books entitled [book: Most Everything You Know About The World Is Basically Correct].

All of that said, PB and I would surely agree that the conventional wisdom often gets things disastrously wrong. To take but one example, you can look at conventional views of market regulation. From the New Deal through World War II and up until the 1960s, the conventional wisdom — which took canonical form, perhaps, in the great Paul Samuelson’s 1948 textbook — was that the goal of economics was to control markets toward desired ends. Eventually the conventional wisdom switched to the idea that markets were best left on their own. You can argue both sides of this — and, importantly in this context, academia *has* argued both sides of it, continuously, for half a century. What made the switch happen? Well, it’s complicated, but surely a part of it is that it’s convenient for businessmen to argue that they’re best left unregulated. They were going to argue this anyway; academic economics just offered them some tools. But a whole set of entirely orthodox economic results says something quite different: what individual actors do rationally on their own can lead to a disastrous, unwanted result in the aggregate. You can look anywhere within orthodox economics for confirmation of this idea (see Bowles, [book: Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution]; and Schelling, [book: Micromotives and Macrobehavior]). The problem probably isn’t academic rejection of heterodoxy; it’s that economics can be used as a tool of ideology in a more direct way than can mathematics, so it *is* used as such a tool.

Of course PB is right that there were big glaring warning signs that we were in an unsustainable bubble. Dean Baker flagged a lot of these in [book: Plunder and Blunder]. Lots of very intelligent keepers of the conventional wisdom, like Bernanke and Greenspan (Ph.D.s both), who should have known better, got it wrong. All this tells me is that, when the economy’s booming and lots of people are making money, it’s very hard to be the guy who (as the conventional saying goes) “takes the punch bowl away.” Now that everything’s collapsed, we’ll have more people honoring the conventional wisdom. The wisdom was always there; the will to follow it was not.

As for PB’s generous invitation to read along with him on one or more topics: it’s a generous offer, but take a look at how much other stuff is either in my queue or sitting on my floor, tempting me. Add to that a chapter-by-chapter read of Adam Smith, a heretofore-unnannounced chapter-by-chapter read of Gerard Debreu’s [book: Theory of Value], and a couple bits of big news that I’m waiting to fully ferment before I mention them here; the result is that I don’t have the time to read in what sound like fascinating areas. But I appreciate the offer.

Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

October 13, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Standard Everyman's Library cover: a photo of the author with an effect over top as though you were viewing him through many very thin blinds on a window.

This is a bit more fun and quite a bit less dark than [book: The Maltese Falcon]. Though both here and there, someone is dead within the first couple pages, basically within mere moments of contacting the narrator or main character.

Here the narrator is a lovably lazy, bibulous man named Nick Charles. He used to be a private investigator, but he’s long since retired to attend to the investments left to him when his wife’s father died. Charles jokes on a few occasions about marrying her for the money, and you’re never quite sure if it’s a joke or a “joke.”

He comes semi-unwillingly out of retirement to investigate Just One More Case, when his old lawyer friend and war buddy calls him up to say that an old eccentric client has gotten back in touch; soon after, a confidant of that client is dead, and we’re immediately to wonder: did the crazy guy do it? (Answer: maybe!)

[book: The Thin Man]’s main allure is the nutty family from which the crazy man comes; they’re brilliantly drawn characters. Years ago he’d divorced his capricious, violent, unpredictable wife Mimi, who lights up this book’s pages (even if it’s a blacklight) and leaves you just a little terrified every time you meet her. She’s such a caricature that she belongs on stage where she can be rendered operatically. (I imagine this was deliberate. [book: The Thin Man] got turned into a series of six movies and a television show.) Mimi’s son reminds me of Elijah Wood’s character from [film: Sin City], only without the violence but with the capacity, lurking just below the surface, for utter terror.

Every Hammett novel in this collection must feature a gorgeous 20-something blonde. The one here is Mimi’s daughter, who has apparently grown from a gorgeous child to a delicious adult. At one point she passes out drunk, and Nick and his wife undress her for bed — seemingly for no purpose other than so that Hammett and the audience can gaze lovingly upon her “beautiful little body.” Whenever she shows up, someone is drooling over her; clearly we’re meant to as well.

Again, since we know that we’re going to be led bewilderingly through twist after twist and turn after turn, the plot is incidental. Phone calls, letters, and chance meetings seemingly deflect Nick from finding the killer, but we know that in the back of his capacious mind he’s keeping it all together and ploddingly unmasking the bad guy. Meanwhile he does some copious drinking. It’s great fun.

Quick note on Boston-area ramen

October 12, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

I’ve had ramen now at two Boston-area establishments: Sapporo, within the Porter Exchange; and now Ken’s, within the Super 88 Market in Allston. I’d heard from multiple sources that Ken’s was the best around here, but I was sorely disappointed. One item on the menu advertised a rather more intense pork flavor, and the waiter recommended that, so I got it. It was not intense. The broth was thin and uninspiring. The only real plus side to their ramen was the combination of boiled egg and nori. Plus the noodles were maybe a bit more substantial than Sapporo’s.

Sapporo … I’m kind of obsessed. They advertise their broth as being filled with “rich collagen” after cooking for “over ten hours.” It really is an intense, flavorful, buttery, full-bodied broth. That’s broth you want to bring home to mother. But you wouldn’t, is the thing, because it is soup rather than a person.

Next time I’m at Sapporo, I’ll ask them if they can throw in a couple sheets of nori to their house ramen. With that added, it won’t even be a contest.

__P.S.__: I need to check out Men Tei, it seems. I’m always glad to explore the area’s ramen.

__P.P.S. (14 October 2010)__: Verdict on Men Tei: Nice noodles, and a lot of noodles, but uninspiring broth. Also not much *in* the broth. I got the pork cutlet, which definitely felt as though it came from a package of frozen cutlets. This is of a piece with the octopus balls, which people on ChowHound suggests really do come from a frozen package. Men Tei seems to have very little kitchen at all, so this isn’t surprising. But in any case: nothing to write home about. I think my Sapporo homecoming will come soon.

Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History

October 12, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

(__Attention conservation notice__: just about 1100 words, plus some block quotes, on the systematic perversion of American history to serve ideological ends, and Jill Lepore’s remarkable stand for viewing our history through clear eyes.)

Tomato-red background. Title in bold white sans-serif, subtitle in black non-bold, author name in white bold. 'Author of Pulitzer Prize finalist _New York Burning_' in smaller print below. Two colonial figurines at the bottom of the cover. One is standing, looking sort of pensive and formal. The other is laying on his back, pointing his musket up towards the top of the book.

Let’s take it as an axiom, to begin, that the Constitution is not perfect. I’ll hand the mic here to Justice Thurgood Marshall, to whom Lepore handed it as well:

> The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the “more perfect Union” it is said we now enjoy.
>
> I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

The Civil War is refutation enough of the eternal wisdom of the Framers. The fact that the Constitution explicitly counts a slave as three-fifths of a human should have long since put to bed any rumors of its perfection. African-Americans are in a better position than most to recognize the Constitution’s defects.

Yet we accept the mythology that we’re dealt. In this country, the Constitution’s perfection, and the immortality of the Framers, is as close as we get to gospel (quite literally — see below). Everyone wants the Constitution for himself. Whenever someone wants to make a change to the existing order, the most resonant thing he can say about it is that it brings the U.S. closer to the perfection that lies latent within the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The [court: Brown v. Board] decision sought integration to bring us closer to the ideals of the Constitution, while at the same time parents in Boston who opposed forced busing declared Arthur Garrity’s decision the end of American liberty.

The history of the U.S. can in many ways be viewed as the history of misrepresenting our history. Everyone wants to make the story of the founding his own, so everyone has to find a way to mold the founding into his preferred shape.

Take, for instance, the famed “Christian nation” story. According to this story, the country was Christian at its founding, the Framers knew that religion is inseparable from good government, they knew that the purpose of government is to bring people closer to God, and the separation of church and state is a myth. In this Christian nation, Connecticut’s 1639 Fundamental Orders decreed that one of its purposes was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” Which is why it’s important to observe, as Lepore does, that

> Following the faith of their fathers is exactly what the framers did not do. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one.

Meanwhile, when conservatives insist that we read the Federalist Papers, they seem less insistent that we read the parts where the Framers were inveighing against the evils of standing armies — hence the part of the Constitution which embodies that revulsion by giving Congress the power

> To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years

That two-year limitation is in there expressly because the Framers thought — like many classical small-r republican thinkers over the centuries — that standing armies were a great evil.

Lepore’s ingenious little book is meant to revisit points like these: to remind us that the Framers by no means spoke with one mind and that when they did speak with one mind they often contradicted their modern interpretation; and to ensure us that if they returned to us today they would probably *not* be horrified by what we’ve made of their document. It was broken at birth. The U.S. has spent centuries trying to repair it.

Lepore interviews dozens of Tea Partiers on a cold day when they visited Boston (Lepore’s town — she’s a professor at Harvard) in early 2010. Every time a Tea Partier says something about what the Framers would have wanted, or how liberals are destroying America, she steps back as a good historian would and studies the truth of their claim. Liberals believe that America is always wrong, say Tea Partiers? You need to go back a ways if you want to find the first person to believe that about the U.S. Try Frederick Douglass:

> What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

If they’re even guilty themselves of hating America, liberals didn’t invent that hatred. Hating what the country stands for is as American as slavery.

So what the Tea Party advances is a strange kind of fundamentalism, in the literal sense of that word. Fundamentalism (the OED traces the word to 1923, when it was used to refer to American Christians) believes in returning to some original text which it believes to be flawless and true. Constitutional fundamentalists believe that they can find a single, true meaning in the original document, even though we know that the origins of that document were far from holy. The origin was a compromise between northern and southern states meant, for one, to keep the country from flying apart. (It did anyway, 70 years later). Yet this fundamentalism, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore the supporting texts and the all-too-well-documented history surrounding it.

Academic historians, for their part, have not helped. As Lepore notes, historians have long resisted the urge to “presentism” — the idea that you can naïvely map the past onto the present and draw some sort of easy moral. (One thinks of “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”) The academy has become more cloistered, and as a result has stopped engaging with the public on the great themes. Instead, when historians interact with the world nowadays, they tend to narrow the lens as far as they can and write little biographies. The last historian to engage with the great themes, says Lepore, was my hero Richard Hofstadter, of the magisterial [book: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life]; it’s truly a stellar example of the great-theme brand of history. “The historians will have a field day [with his The American Political Tradition And the Men Who Made It]”, he said, “but I am in hopes that some of the non-academic people will like it.”

Having largely left the field, historians have allowed all manner of charlatans to move in and define what our history is. The Texas School Board could leap in and define Thomas Jefferson — “who once wrote about a ‘wall of separation between Church & State’” — out of our history, and instead add Thomas Aquinas to the list of thinkers who inspired the Revolution. (Poor Thomas Jefferson. The man has been endlessly defined into and out of American history so many times since his death; see [book: The Jefferson Image in the American Mind] for the final word on this score.)

Lepore, with [book: The Whites of Their Eyes], has forcefully retaken the field. She’s a historian engaging directly with an anti-historical ideology. In a remarkably concise and deceptively simple way, it returns to the tradition of grand history. She clearly rushed it into print to engage with a current controversy, but didn’t skimp at all on historical rigor. It’s a treasure, and something you’ll want to hold in your back pocket for the next few troubled years.

Greg Mankiw overloads two words until they collapse

October 12, 2010/stevereads/1 Comment

There’s been a bit of a debate about Greg Mankiw’s recent [newspaper: New York Times] column, with Kevin Drum giving it a rather nice smackdown. Mankiw comes back today with some responses. I didn’t get past the first one:

> If no one is proposing eliminating taxes, why compare the Obama policy to a world without taxes? Economists understand that, absent externalities, the undistorted situation reflects an optimal allocation of resources. […]

My first thought was that that’s a very narrow description of “optimal allocation of resources.” If you don’t pay taxes, the government doesn’t build roads, doesn’t fund a Defense Department to keep the borders safe, doesn’t keep your food safe via the FDA, doesn’t regulate airlines via the FAA, etc. How exactly will the corn (the “resource” in this example) arrive at your grocery store (that is, be “allocated”) without a system of roads to get it there? And how will those roads be built without taxes? This is the economists’ magical definition of “optimal allocation of resources”.

That’s when I realized: all the things I mentioned are hidden within Mankiw’s “absent externalities”. Those are two bizarrely overloaded words in this context.
As Justin Fox makes clear in his terrific [book: Myth of the Rational Market], there’s been a long divide in economics between the institutionalists and the rest. (I think the rest have a name, but I’ve forgotten it.) The institutionalists emphasize that when Mankiw talks about “optimal allocation of resources,” he’s brushing aside most of what makes the world interesting.

Take contracts, for instance, which are the most basic weapon within the economist’s arsenal. Economists assume that transactions can be “completely contracted,” meaning that every detail of the transaction can be spelled out and its violation quickly detected. But a contract, so described, is an abstraction hiding a lot underneath it. What happens if I violate a contract that you and I signed? You take it to a court, presumably. The court rules against me and orders me to pay up. What happens if I don’t? The full weight of the state comes down on me to make me pay you. So even talking about “complete contracting” — which is an essential element leading to Mankiw’s “optimal allocation of resources” — requires you to talk about some sort of enforcement mechanism. That enforcement mechanism could be a government, or it could be a mafia that’s willing to break my legs, but in any case there’s an *institutional structure* underneath the contract. Getting the institutions to ensure complete contracts costs money: either the government has to be willing to bring cops with guns to my house to make me pay up, or the mafia has to employ dudes with baseball bats, but someone somewhere needs to be standing ready to enforce that contract.

Now then. I hope we agree that we need to give up something — be it taxes or Vinny’s valuable free time — in order to allow contracts to be signed and enforced. I hope we agree that signing contracts is vital to the optimal allocation of resources. Therefore, I hope we agree that we need to give up something to attain the optimal allocation of resources. So how does it even begin to make sense for Mankiw to say that a tax-free world is relevant in any discussion at all? I contend that it’s only relevant if you ignore institutions — which is exactly what Mankiw is doing.

(Note also that the most basic contract of them all — the labor contract — cannot be completely contracted, as has been known since 1951.)

Little iPhone UI details

October 12, 2010/stevereads/1 Comment

(__Attention conservation notice__: 800 words documenting the near-perfection of the iPhone user interface. Plus a small suggestion for how they could improve it still more.)

Things the iPhone does that I’ve not seen anyone else do:

* There’s a ‘.com’ button when you’re typing in a field that accepts domain names (like an email-address field, for instance). I only realized recently that you can press and hold the .com button to get .net, .edu, .org, and .us.

* It gets cooler. Add an international keyboard (Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard…), then go back to an URL field (like in Safari, say). Suppose you added an Arabic keyboard. Now look at what the .com button has: top-level domains for Arabic countries, like .ae. Similar things happen if you add French keyboards, etc.

* Spell-check will not flag words if those words are in your address book. It does better than just not flagging them, actually: if you type a friend’s name in lowercase, it’ll correct the case for you.

* Probably most every iPhone/Touch user has noticed by now that you can go into the Maps application and start typing the name of someone in your contacts for whom you have a physical address; the Maps app will offer you any matching physical addresses.

You’d expect — or at least, *I’d* expect — Google to get this right, too. After all, when you’re signed into your Google account, Google knows about your contacts; it should be easy enough to carry that contact information over into Google Maps. But they don’t.

* This next one is easier to describe by example. I have a friend, Chris Rugen, whom I’ve jokingly put into my iPhone contacts as “Chris Rügen”; my iPhone contacts sync with Google. In the iPhone, if I start typing “rug”, it offers up “Rügen” as a completion — even though the “u” that I typed has no umlaut over it.

I’ve found no other system that does the completion this intelligently. Thunderbird doesn’t. Google itself doesn’t, either: searching within my Gmail contacts for “rugen” doesn’t return the accented contact. In either Thunderbird or Google, I need to start typing Chris’s actual email address — which contains no accent, of course — in order for them to find Chris.

These are all just little things, but that’s *exactly* what makes the iPhone what it is: nearly all the little things are done perfectly. You get a sense of calm when you play with an iPhone (and “play,” by the way, is exactly the right verb), because nothing is out of line with what it should be. Computers have a habit of steadily accumulating frustrations; the iPhone does not.

One thing the iPhone does need to do differently is related to the Archive button in the email client, which only arrived in one of the new iOS releases (I want to say 4.0). If you have a Gmail account, the Archive button will do the same thing on the phone that the Archive button does on Gmail’s website. That’s great. But there’s no Archive operation available for non-Gmail accounts. Worse, the Archive button gets replaced with a delete button for non-Gmail accounts. So if you’re used to archiving messages by tapping the leftmost button, muscle memory alone will often make you delete messages accidentally. This gets especially to be a problem now that iOS 4 does a single combined universal inbox: you don’t know which account a given message is coming from (could be Gmail, could be not), so the very same inbox view can sometimes make that button do archival, sometimes do deletion. It’s a dangerous combination. (Though not too dangerous: you can always retrieve the deleted message from the Trash, if you notice soon enough that you deleted rather than archived.)

What’s odd is that fixing this to work with all account types wouldn’t be that hard, unless I’m missing something. Right now you can configure which folders on your remote server will be used for drafts, sent mail, and deleted messages: go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> [account name] -> Account Info -> Advanced and look under Mailbox Behaviors. If the folders you’ve specified don’t exist, I believe the iPhone mail client will create them. It would be easy enough to add an ‘Archives Mailbox’ item under there.

I can see a reason why they might not do this. Gmail’s archives folder is called ‘All Mail’ on the server side, so a sensible default name for the archives folder would be ‘All Mail’. But on a non-Gmail account — IMAP, say, or Exchange — maybe that name would be confusing. Maybe on those sorts of accounts, it would be smarter to call the folder ‘Archives’. But then you’ve got an inconsistency between the name of the archives folder on different types of server; that may confuse users.

What Adam Smith really said: chapter-by-chapter study invitation

October 11, 2010/stevereads/10 Comments

If I understand my intellectual history correctly, Adam Smith is much-misunderstood. We typically quote two passages from [book: The Wealth of Nations]:

> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

and

> By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

And that’s about it. But it’s a large book, no? Just about 600 pages, as a matter of fact. And he has a second book, [book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments], that’s almost as long. That’s 1200 pages, from which we usually extract about two paragraphs. How about this other paragraph, in which Smith makes the case for what we’d today call progressive taxation?

> The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich; and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

That’s three paragraphs, anyway. Let’s do all 1200 pages, shall we? Starting about a month from today — Monday, November 15th — I’m going to start reading [book: The Wealth of Nations] and [book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments] and offer a chapter-by-chapter excursus on this here blog. Let’s have a big old book group about What Adam Smith Really Said. I predict that we’ll be surprised. I expect that he’s not nearly the libertarian, every-man-for-himself, minimal-government-is-the-best government guy that we’ve come to know.

But I don’t know! I’ve not read Smith (apart from three paragraphs). It’ll be a surprise. Let’s do it.

The editions I’m thinking of are linked above, but again:

* [book: The Wealth of Nations] (Modern Library, unabridged)
* [book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments] (Great Minds, not sure if it’s unabridged but seems to be)

Get them out of the library, buy them from your favorite bookseller, etc. Starting in a month, let’s talk Adam Smith.

__P.S.__: My homedogg Paul noted that the initial [book: Wealth of Nations] link I provided was an abridged Great Minds edition. I’ve corrected that to the Modern Library edition.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

October 9, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Standard Everyman's Library cover: a photo of the author with an effect over top as though you were viewing him through many very thin blinds on a window.

Somehow I’ve been entirely innocent of detective novels, though I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve seen of the genre on film; I loved [film: The Big Heat] and [film: The Big Sleep], for instance. But somehow I’ve never seen [film: The Maltese Falcon] on film, even though I love Humphrey Bogart and have long been told that the movie is a must-see. So when my friend Dan Milstein emailed me to say that the book has some of the best dialogue he’s ever read *ever*, I had to pick it up.

It doesn’t disappoint. Actually, maybe there’s one disappointment, namely that I have no choice but to envision Bogart in the role of Sam Spade. Spade, if you’re not aware, is the prototypical (I wonder if he actually *is* the prototype) private detective. He’s practically a rock moving through the world: he’s entirely self-sufficient, impermeable to outside influences of any kind, and keeps his own council. The reader is just as uncertain as any of the characters about what drives him. Consequently, from moment to moment you have no idea what he’s going to do. But you can be sure that he’s never going to lose his cool. He’ll never strike anyone in anger, because it’s not clear that he ever gets angry. He’s cool as a cucumber, always plotting his next move. He’s always one step ahead of the bad guys. You know that everything will be wrapped up at the end with a nice bow, and that Spade’s hands will remain perfectly clean.

I used to frown on this sort of genre, because it’s very formulaic. Nowadays I’m inclined to believe that most popular entertainment (some of which deserves to be called “art,” some of which doesn’t) is formulaic, and that most innovation comes within formulae. You know a lot of things already about detective novels and movies. There’s going to be a drop-dead gorgeous dame who’s going to double-cross the hero, possibly before triple-crossing the bad guys and redeeming herself. All the women will be straight out of Hitchcock: bombshell seductresses who are strong-willed right up to the moment that they swoon into the protagonist’s arms. There are going to be many reversals of fortune. There’s going to be a MacGuffin that everyone’s going to be obsessed with chasing. You can’t be sure that the police are good guys. Finally, the character of the private dick himself will be sweet and sensitive beneath a surly exterior. So the plot is already very constrained; it takes a brilliant writer to keep the story gripping even within those constraints.

[book: The Maltese Falcon] is brilliant indeed — gripping and intensely readable the whole way through. The plot is basically incidental, but let’s summarize it anyway. Right from the start, the beautiful dame, a Miss Wonderly, is waiting for him in his office. She tells Spade that her 17-year-old sister has run off with a man named Floyd Thursby, and that Wonderly has a date with him that very night to convince him to bring her sister back. She asks Spade and his partner to follow Thursby, perchance to find her sister and bring her back before Wonderly’s parents find out what’s happened.

Spade’s partner is dead within the first eight pages, Thursby’s dead within 19, Wonderly’s name isn’t actually Wonderly, we never hear again about the sister, and everything is actually baroquely related to a priceless antiquity that gives the book its name. I think I’ll stop there; the great joy in this novel is finding out how everything unwinds and how Spade navigates it all without getting the slightest bit of muck on his suit.

It’s a sheer joy, and Hammett is a superb prose stylist. His writing is as deliberate and forceful as Spade: we picture Hammett walking into a room, quickly sketching out the people and objects within it, and chopping the dialogue out of blocks of marble with a few clean hits on the chisel. All the lines are clean and neat, and we picture every scene perfectly with seemingly no effort on Hammett’s part.

I foresee myself developing a Hammett-and-Chandler obsession.

__P.S.__: As you might be able to tell from the cover photo at right, [book: The Maltese Falcon] comes from a collection of three novels in a single Everyman edition. I’ll review them individually here.

Steve Reads

Author: stevereads