2010-08-22T08:33:56+00:00

Speaking of Lukas’s Common Ground

August 22, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

(…as we were), it helped me realize another thing that’s really annoying about Ann Patchett’s novel [book: Run]: it’s ripped directly from [book: Common Ground], only it loses all of the latter’s majesty and honesty toward its characters, and replaces them with cheap sentimentality. One of the families that Lukas follows in [book: Common Ground], for instance, ends up suffering a crime so horrifying that thinking about it has denied me sleep on a few occasions; Lukas depicts the crime matter-of-factly, because his whole project is to turn an honest eye on race and on cities. A ghastly crime simply wouldn’t fit within Patchett’s world; it’s not treacly enough for her, and [book: Run] is trying so hard to Say Something that it avoids being honest when it should.

I’d invite you to read [book: Common Ground] and then [book: Run], and tell me that Patchett didn’t ape the former in writing the latter. It would be one thing if she’d aped it with any respect or skill; as it is, she colorized it and replaced the soundtrack with carnival music.

J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

August 22, 2010/stevereads/1 Comment

Cover of 'Common Ground': a school bus with a big squadron of police standing in front of it
I’ve been horribly remiss in not writing a review of Lukas’s monumental [book: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families]. To say that it’s a book about Boston’s 1970s-era busing crisis is to be, at some level, accurate, but to miss the immense, teeming landscape that Lukas has painted. [book: Common Ground] is nothing less than a history of race in the United States. It is a landmark. It is among the two or three nonfiction books that you really must read, along with Caro’s [book: Power Broker] and Rhodes’s [book: Making of the Atomic Bomb].

[book: Common Ground] views race through three lenses: the Divers, white pioneers into Boston’s South End; the Twymons, black and living in the South End projects; and the white Irish McGoffs of Charlestown. The Divers are what you might call yuppies, though it is to Lukas’s extreme credit that he would never let a character be reduced to a label. The Divers, in any case, are some of the brave white folks who ventured into the South End when it was no place for white people, to try to build a neighborhood and a community. The Twymons — mother and children — are not destined for a happy life in the projects. The McGoffs are right in the thick of — and active participants in — the most virulent Charlestown racism.

Lukas is sympathetic toward his characters, and has the gift of telling their stories exactly as they themselves would tell them. And like [book: Love in the Time of Cholera], Lukas takes the time, at every moment when it’s necessary, to step back and explain a bit of history if it’s important to his characters. Time and again we pause from the present moment to learn about someone’s poor Irish ancestors, or someone’s slave grandparents. The effect is that we’re not just reading three stories; we’re reading a web of interconnections. Boston, which so often gets tamed into an abbreviated “There was the Boston Tea Party … and then MIT came! … And now we have software. … Let’s walk the Freedom Trail!”, gets rightfully recast as the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that it really is.

Along the way, we meet many, many people. Probably the two strongest characters are Louise Day Hicks, member of the Boston School Committee, daughter of an iconic judge, and symbol of virulent anti-busing racism; and Arthur Garrity, the judge who wrote the momentous decision mandating busing for Boston’s schools. Hicks comes across looking opportunistic, brilliant, and willing to attach herself to the most despicable ideas if they’d advance her career. Garrity stands aloof from the havoc that he arguably created, calmly resisting all efforts to avoid busing. These two wildly different people are beacons in the storm.

A blurb on [book: Common Ground]’s cover by Studs Terkel, that master of ground-level history, says that it tells a truth about “all large American cities.” That is very true, but like most any attempt to describe [book: Common Ground], this vastly understates the scope of its accomplishment. [book: Common Ground] tells the story of race in America as only a book about American cities can. Cities are the crucible where all of America’s problems get worked out — or not. If the problems get solved, they get solved here; if they fail, they fail here. Lukas documents the failure of American racial integration, and the arguably noble experiment that led to that failure.

I can’t emphasize enough, though, that one of the things that makes [book: Common Ground] so powerful is that, while Lukas may have set his sights on the stars, he knew that the only way to reach them was to start down in the dirt. At no point in [book: Common Ground] do you feel as though Lukas is trying to Make A Point. He probably *is* trying to do so, but he’s too disciplined a writer to give in to cheap moralizing or easy grandiosity. What’s grandiose in [book: Common Ground] are its people — each of them down in the shit with everyone else, surviving and maybe thriving as well as they possibly can. If their survival or their failure has any larger meaning, Lukas lets the characters and their history bring out that meaning.

American history has been, in large part, the history of race, the history of America’s original sin, and the history of its attempts to expiate that sin. In [book: Common Ground], Lukas has condensed this history into the interrelated lives of a few Bostonians. In 200 years, [book: Common Ground] will be on the shelf along with a select few other books that mapped out where America came from and where it tried to go.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

August 20, 2010/stevereads/1 Comment

Neat cover. Avocado-green background, with a cartoon image of a man in a suit who is free-falling through the sky. His briefcase has detached from his hand, it's open, and there are papers flying out. The papers are scattering to the winds, and one of those papers carries the book's title and authors.
This book is selling very well and has initiated lots of conversations, so I can’t say that it’s a failure. Its authors are in high demand all over the place for their observations on the current economic crisis. Good for them. If I were a policymaker, I’d probably really like this book. As an educated lay reader, it turns out this isn’t the book for me.

It’s more of a compendium — an almanac, really — of financial statistics, with not very much narration layered atop. What it brings to the world is a large database of financial crises, painstakingly compiled from lots of sources. The data mostly span 200 years in the cases of banking crises and international defaults, reaching the full 800 years advertised in the subtitle only in the cases of things like hyperinflation or currency debasement. It’s interesting, but it’s not the kind of thing you want to take with you on a bus ride.

It is, with some justice, focused on the misbehavior of governments. We start out learning about government external defaults — reneging on debts owed to foreign governments. Reinhart and Rogoff note one outstanding puzzle: why do governments default when, in many cases, their debt-to-GDP or debt-to-revenue ratio is not terribly high (c. 10% or 20%)? If you examine also their *internal* defaults, Reinhart and Rogoff note that a lot of the puzzle goes away: governments often default to external partners when they can’t afford to pay their domestic creditors, either. But governments have an advantage over their domestic creditors in a way that they don’t over their external partners: they can put domestic creditors in jail, or kill them. It’s much harder to collect data on internal defaults, if only because such defaults will often be hidden beneath executions.

Governments have other tricks to get out of paying off their debts. One way is to hyperinflate the economy, thereby inflating their way out of debt. Another, similar way is to debauch the currency; this has been happening for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the earliest examples involving slicing tiny bits off gold and silver coins and decreeing that the coins are worth what uncut ones were. The invention of paper “fiat currency,” Reinhart and Rogoff note, has been a boon for rulers who want to inflate their money: it’s much easier to print more paper than it is to adulterate gold coins. No country has avoided defaulting on its debts by inflating its currency; the U.S. did so, rather stealthily, when it went off the gold standard after World War I.

The final category of “financial folly” that Reinhart and Rogoff tackle are the banking crises. The world thought we’d figured out how to avoid these — through banking-insurance systems like the FDIC — until the “shadow banking” system did us in during the current crisis.

In all these cases, Reinhart and Rogoff make a thorough, detailed case that there is nothing new under the sun: the crises that we had hundreds of years ago are the same ones we have now and the same ones we’ll probably have hundreds of years from now. There’s some slight hope that economic knowledge really will improve our policies, but it’s only slight.

Being largely a compendium of charts — typically one every other page, or more — the biggest sin this book commits is that the charts are just not that readable. My kingdom for some bolding in the chart captions; as it was, my eye flailed around on every chart, trying to pick out the things I was supposed to read. Each chart came with a hefty caption, detailing the many sources where its numbers came from. Each chart was subtly different: raw billions, percent of GDP, counts of crises since some specified time. Tons and tons of charts to read, yet the amount of time devoted to designing the charts was clearly much less than that devoted to the book’s overall design — which is *gorgeous*. (I let Princeton University Press know, by way of Twitter, how beautiful this book is; they thanked me, and told me that they’d pass along the good word to their designer. I’m happy to hear that; I don’t imagine book designers get much credit, usually.)

If you’re a policymaker, you probably want to read this book. Though I wonder if your time would be better spent with something like Dean Baker’s [book: Plunder and Blunder]; it’s short, and it contains a few rules of thumb to detect bubbles: principally price-to-earnings ratios above a certain threshold and property values growing very much at all. [book: This Time Is Different] seems like it will turn out to be more useful for the data it’s compiled, which others will put to use preventing future bubbles. It may not be a practical tool on its own.

A question about Keynesian stimulus

August 16, 2010/stevereads/5 Comments

Here’s my dime-store understanding of Keynes (which tells me, by the way, that I need to go reread the [book: General Theory]):

* Companies aren’t investing because they expect that in the near future, customers won’t be buying. They expect this for the completely justified reason that customers aren’t buying right now.
* So companies don’t put their money into new factories and new machines and so forth. Instead they put it in the bank.
* So they don’t hire new workers to man the new machines.
* Now there’s less money in the pockets of the workers. So they buy less.
* So rational companies look ahead and see more of the same: nobody’s buying, so they won’t be investing.
* And so on down the drain.

So the government steps in to halt the self-fulfilling prophecy. The government hires workers to pave the roads, build bridges, paint murals, etc. They give those workers, let’s say, $10,000 apiece. Since they’re largely on the poorer end of the economic ladder, they spend most of that money on food and other necessities. Let’s say they spend 80% of what the government pays them. So they spend $8,000 of that $10,000. Someone else has then earned $8,000; assuming the recipient is situated similarly to the spender, 80% of that $8,000 then becomes new spending. And so forth. The initial $10,000 becomes $50,000 through this process of multiplication. (In general, if people spend r% of what they earn, the initial investment gets multiplied by 100/(100-r).)

Now companies expect that things will be different. They expect that next quarter will look a lot like this one, and this one turned out not to be too bad. So they invest. They hire more workers. Those workers spend money. That money gets multiplied, as above. The pump has been primed, the economy is rolling again, and yay.

Here’s my question, though: shouldn’t we expect companies to know that the good times won’t last? Companies must be expected to know that business will only keep moving so long as the government is supplying the jobs, right? Likewise, those employees working at government-provided jobs know that their jobs — paving roads, building bridges, painting murals — are only temporary. To the extent that they have any control over it, they’re going to try to save that money for a rainy day; they know that a rainy day is just around the corner.

The only honest way I can see out of this is for the government to credibly commit to a certain amount of continuous job-creation until the economy has reached some pre-determined goal (GDP increasing by a 3% annualized rate per quarter or whatever). Once the economy is moving on its own, the government promises to stop making work; until then, it’ll do everything it can. This creates the right expectations.

On the basis of this argument, including the bit about the multiplier, I don’t see what the difference — from the perspective of getting the economy moving — would be between a) the government mailing $10,000 checks to a million newly unemployed people, and b) the government creating jobs for a million newly unemployed people. In both cases you’re putting money in the unemployed folks’ pockets, and you expect that they’ll spend roughly the same fraction in each case.

Obviously there are non-stimulus reasons to prefer employment to mailing a check: work is good for people’s self-esteem, crime goes down when people are occupied, and in any case we should be spending money to fix things that need fixing. But toward the goal of setting expectations about the future, the cash and the work seem identical.

So *is there* any stimulus explanation for not just giving people a check? And, to get to the earlier question: is the idea of a one-time stimulus — *any* one-time stimulus — just doomed from the start? If you don’t set the expectation that you’ll pay whatever is needed, for however long it’s needed, won’t minimally rational economic actors be too cautious about spending what they have?

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

August 12, 2010/stevereads/1 Comment

A wildly colored portrait of Nagasaki harbor
If you’ve read any of David Mitchell’s earlier books, specifically [book: Cloud Atlas], I imagine you’ll think — like I did — that [book: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet] takes place over literally a thousand years. I should burst that bubble for you now: it doesn’t. Somewhere in the middle of the book, you learn that Japan is the land of a thousand autumns.

To your and my surprise, then, this is a completely straightforward novel. I think Mitchell may have been compelled to convince the world that, yes, he can write novels that start one place, end another place, and don’t try to mess with your mind. He does it very well, as it turns out.

The title character lands in the Dutch outpost on Dejima, just off the coast of Nagasaki. (Right here, I expected that by the end of the book we would be in Nagasaki when the Bomb fell in 1945. The book starts [and, as it turns out, ends] in the 1700s, so I was immediately puzzled: how will Time-Traveling David Mitchell hit 1,000 autumns when we only have a couple hundred years to play with? Honestly, this left me with an odd feeling of anxiety.) He’s been beckoned there to help clean up the books: Dutch authorities believe that there’s been some mischief in the import/export accounting, and de Zoet is just the sort of upright man to clean things up.

Stop here and, being a good economist, consider the incentives. How much luck is a morally upright man going to have in such corrupt circumstances? If everyone’s in on taking a little out of every shipment, our hero will certainly have to be politically astute to avoid dashing his career (if not himself) on the rocks. He’s on a lonely island, surrounded by people he may very well make his enemies. The suspense of watching de Zoet wend his way through this battlefield is where the bulk of the book’s ample charm comes from.

There’s also, of course, a love interest: de Zoet falls curiously in love with a nurse whose face is mysteriously disfigured. I was going to go into some more detail about the difficulties they face in getting together, but I think I won’t. They face difficulties aplenty, needless to say, and the source of those difficulties turns out — as the story goes on — to be horrifying. If I said anything more, I’d risk giving away some of [book: Thousand Autumns]’s captivating plot twists.

It’s an absolutely riveting book; I couldn’t put it down. I might gripe that the ending is too pat (it’s almost as though Mitchell is responding sarcastically to those who believed he couldn’t write a more-standard novel), but that’s small beer: go grab a copy and be absorbed for the next few hours.

Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity

August 12, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Something like an oil painting of what looks like a monk and a scowling dude in a suit, walking together through a pastoral scene.
There’s great promise in this book, which it fails to live up to. It offers too little mathematics to appeal to even recreational mathematicians, and more mathematics than non-mathematically-inclined readers would be able to stomach. At the same time, it offers basically no interesting theology. It does, on the other hand, spend loads of time name-dropping Russian and French mathematicians for no good reason, and tells us all about persecution of academics during the Soviet era. It ought to be called “Russian Mathematicians: Some Things That Happened To Them For 75 Years Or So.”

The book’s fundamental assertion is that religious mysticism in Russia helped fuel the Russians’ great mathematical discoveries, and drove Russia ahead of France by the early part of the 20th century. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it obviously needs more than just some correlation to prove it. All Graham and Kantor have to offer is correlation: this one episode of mysticism happened, and this other episode of Russian mathematical flowering happened. We’re meant to conclude that the one caused the other.

It’s seemed to me, on the other hand, that at least since the great Kolmogorov, Russians have been particularly fond of abstraction for its own sake. This has allowed them to go off in mathematical directions of which the French daren’t dream. Did the Russian talent for abstraction drive their mathematical accomplishments as much as mysticism did? It seems to me that there could be many causes for the Russian mathematical flowering; Graham and Kantor focus on just one.

The reason they focus on just the one is that they’re interested in a particular Russian sect of Christianity, persecuted before and during the Soviet era, called the Name Worshippers. The Name Worshippers apparently believed that one could reach a trance-like state and come closer to god by repeating a particular prayer endlessly. The mathematics of infinity, pioneered by George Cantor, seemed to them a natural fit, for reasons that Graham and Kantor never make clear.

Cantor is most famous for his demonstration that certain infinities are larger than others — an idea that is very hard for many people to stomach, but which is rather easy to demonstrate and utterly commonplace in mathematics today. It was Bertrand Russell, I believe, who used a very straightforward example to demonstrate this. Suppose, said Russell, that you have a village in which a) every man has exactly one wife, b) every wife has exactly one husband, and c) no one marries outside the town. Then it doesn’t matter whether there are finitely many or infinitely many people in the town — you can be certain that there are just as many women as men. Mathematicians say that there is a “bijection” between the set of men in the town and the set of women in the town. If, on the other hand, there were an unmarried woman in the town and no unmarried men, then you could conclude that there were more women than men.

That’s where Cantor starts, in a discussion of very general objects called “sets.” A set is a collection of things bearing some properties in common — say, the set of all people alive and standing within the legal boundaries of Cambridge, Massachusetts at 11:28:00 a.m. on August 12, 2010, along with their couches. Two sets have the same “cardinality” if there exists a bijection between them. Cantor goes on to establish that can exist no bijection between the set of integers and the set of real numbers — that is, that the real numbers (rational numbers plus irrational numbers) is larger than the set of integers. He uses a very clever trick called the diagonal argument in which he first supposes that there *does* exist a bijection between the reals and the integers, then shows that such a bijection always leaves out some real numbers. It is unavoidably true that there are more reals than integers, which is to say that the reals are larger. Which is a special case, finally, of the assertion that some infinities are larger than others.

A lot of mathematicians at the time had trouble with this argument; abstract objects like sets seemed so far removed from the world of human experience that there were bound to be weird paradoxes and strange infinities. Better to stick with objects that were indubitably real, like the integers, and leave the abstract madness out of mathematics. Graham and Kantor blame French and German unwillingness to embrace abstraction for their falling behind the Russians. (The German mathematician Leopold Kronecker is famous for saying that God created the integers and that all else is the work of man.) It was Germans, Russians, and Hungarians, however — the German Gauss, the Russian Lobachevsky, and the Hungarian Bolyai — who had discovered non-Euclidean geometries 40 or 50 years before. Doesn’t this show two things? First, Germans and Hungarians were capable of letting their imaginations roam free, by casting off the Euclidean restraints that humanity had held sacred for 2000 years; they didn’t need Russian mysticism to make it happen. Second, did the Russian Lobachevsky need mysticism to achieve his breakthroughs? If not, then much of Graham and Kantor’s book reduces to “Some Russians needed mysticism. Others did not.” It becomes a documentary about an interesting coincidence, rather than something with any causal importance. Graham and Kantor clearly believe (see the final chapter in particular) that the Name-Worshipping episode is important to the development of mathematics, whereas to me it looks like a coincidence.

Returning to our story, though: the Russian Cantor’s set theory revolutionized all of mathematics. You can’t do serious mathematics now without encountering axioms posed in terms of sets. Look at the definition of a “topology”, for instance. Or what defines a “measure” (a mathematical generalization that covers ideas like “distance” and “weight” and “volume” and many others). You can compute the probability that a billion coin tosses in a row will all come up heads using only finite mathematics; but if you want to answer complicated questions like “what is the probability that a Brownian-motion path is continuous?” [1], you need infinities.

Graham and Kantor name-drop mathematicians and mathematical concepts, but rarely try to explain them; they gesture generally toward “functions of Baire class n” on a few occasions, without ever making it clear what these things are or why we should care. One gathers that a Baire class has something to do with discontinuous functions (the most pathological example of which is f(x) = 1 when x is rational, f(x) = 0 when x is irrational). And on a few occasions, Graham and Kantor suggest that the Russians found discontinuous functions freeing — that continuous functions somehow confine human will. Forgive me if I see absolutely no connection between the two. Graham and Kantor don’t help clarify what the connection might be.

So we get mathematical terms without mathematical understanding, and mysticism that’s mostly mystification. I could do without this book.

__P.S.__: I see that my friend Cosma Shalizi has also reviewed [book: Naming Infinity], but I’ve not read his review yet.

[1] — Brownian motion shows up all over the place. It’s named after Robert Brown, who was studying the motion of pollen particles in water. Einstein used it to help estimate Avogadro’s number. Being physical objects, it’s reasonable to argue that pollen particles must move continuously (i.e., if they go from point A to point B, they must move through every point between A and B — they can’t just jump from one to the other). So then, if Brownian motion is an accurate model for the motion of pollen particles, you’d want to show that the probability of a Brownian-motion path’s being continuous is 1 — that is, that if you picked a Brownian-motion path “at random,” that you’d never pick a path wherein the pollen particle takes discontinuous jumps.

There are obviously infinitely many paths that a particle of pollen could follow; in fact, there are *uncountably* many paths. One is then forced, when judging models with the appropriate degree of skepticism, to hit up against Cantor’s infinities.

Why to get a smart phone

August 10, 2010/stevereads/6 Comments

My friend Carl a while ago expressed some confusion about why he’d ever want to get a smart phone. It’s a reasonable question: carrying a computer on your person at all times is remarkably distracting. If you don’t send text messages, it may seem pointless.

This morning, as I edited the details on a calendar entry on my phone, it struck me that that’s the main thing I couldn’t do without. I enjoy when my phone rings to tell me that I have some event coming in an hour. I enjoy editing events on the phone and knowing that they’ll be synced up with the Google Mind, so that I’ll see the same information right away if I visit the Google Calendar website.

You might justify getting a smart phone by the sheer efficiency of the thing: if you’re carrying an iPod and a phone, why not combine them into one device (manufactured by Apple or otherwise)? Nowadays that efficiency argument seems weaker to me: if it helps me avoid spending endless time online, I’d prefer to have an iPod separate from a dumb phone. But then, iPod+camera+telephone+texting device? I wouldn’t want to carry four separate devices. And it’s really great to have a camera on me at all times. Taking photos and then uploading them immediately to some public service is something I don’t need; people can wait an hour or two to take a look at the food I just ate in a nice restaurant. So it’s not the instant nature of the photos that makes camera phones valuable; it’s being able to take photos at all.

The aggregate effects of omnipresent technology are interesting. For instance, some guy exposed himself on the T the other day, and Twitter helped catch him. That wouldn’t have been possible without omnipresent camera phones and (to a lesser degree) omnipresent social networking on mobile phones. We’re all carrying cameras nowadays; that has to have a marked effect on lots of things (think “police brutality”).

Texting is an interesting phenomenon: as has gotten a lot of notice recently, people are using their phones for voice calls a lot less nowadays, and replace those calls with quick texts. I certainly use my phone that way: for most anyone other than my girlfriend, I make initial arrangements for outings via email, then send little texts as the time approaches: “I’ll be 20 mins late”; “I’m there”; etc. These don’t take away from real in-person socializing at all; I certainly feel like my social life is better than it was 10 years ago when cell phones and texting weren’t so omnipresent.

When I hang out with my girlfriend’s 13-year-old son, I realize that this sort of *what does it all mean* conversation will be completely gone in 15 years, and that the 13-year-old would look at me as though I were the world’s dumbest man if I tried to have it with him now. Kids text much more than they speak on the phone. Period. We can try to shake our fists at the sea on this issue, but it would be incredibly pointless to do so. (Likewise, arguing against MP3s and in favor of physical media, or inveighing against casual file sharing between friends, has long since become the most wasteful use of your time. People share MP3s. Period. We may be unhappy about this because it denies artists some money, but it is a fact.)

One thing I definitely don’t miss from the dumb-phone era is that silly thing where you lose your phone and then email all your friends, “Hi, I lost my phone. Please send me your contact information.” That is totally played out. I sync all my contacts to Google now; if I lose my phone or get a new one or wipe and reinstall the OS, I take 30 seconds to create a new Google account on the phone, then start it syncing. Within a couple minutes I have all my contacts and all my calendar entries on the device. I enjoy that very much.

“Contacts” here also includes a lot of businesses; for some of those businesses I only have a physical address. It’s awfully handy, for someone with a sense of direction as bad as mine is, living in a non-Euclidean city like Boston, to be able to use a map, compass, GPS, and Google Maps to find my way from wherever I am to a favorite café.

The rest of what’s on my phone count as nice-to-haves. It’s nice to be able to write email from my phone, but I can certainly wait until I get in front of a full computer for that. It’s nice to have a web browser, so that I can settle some point of curiosity in the middle of a conversation; but as I think we’re all discovering, it would be a lot better for society in general if we put the phones away during any outing. So I’d actually contend that a mobile browser turns out to be a slightly net negative. Having Facebook and Twitter apps on the phone is probably a net negative: they’re little distracting games.

I’d say, then, that the main reasons to get a smart phone are

* never again needing to bother your friends with requests for contact information
* your calendar and contacts, available at all times and synced with an external service
* not needing to carry a separate camera, iPod, and phone

Everything else is nice to have, or actively harmful to your attention span.

I’ve certainly found that having a mobile computer has reduced my attention span. When I’m reading a book, I typically pull out my iPhone every few minutes: email, Facebook, Twitter, repeat. Sometimes I put my iPhone and laptop in another room while I’m reading. When I go on vacations, I leave all technology behind and bring a stack of books with me. (My lovely girlfriend, bless her heart, realizes that all I want to do on vacation is read books and spend time with her, and she’s more than willing to accommodate me on both.)

These reactions to my own distraction are possible because I remember when it was otherwise. I’m very curious how life will be for Stephanie’s sons, who didn’t exist before the Web and who became conscious entities during the era of the cell phone. They may not realize that a world with longer periods of focus is even possible or desirable.

Lest you think that I’m going to predict doom and gloom, I’m not going to. When I read John Ruskin, I saw an earlier generation of this descent-into-darkness brand of pessimism. Ruskin saw his beloved pastoral England destroyed by mass production and the dark satanic mills, and assumed that cities would always be destructive to the human soul. It’s possible that he was right: maybe, if you transplanted me back into late-18th-century England, I’d be brought to tears by the beauty of that lost world. Granted, though, that macro changes often bear no resemblance to the desires of any individual actor, I think people tend to adapt the world around them to what they want. The city I live in now serves my needs pretty well.

In 150 years or so, I suspect the techno-pessimists of today (like George Packer) will look a lot like Ruskin: correct in some points, maybe tragic in their correctness, but shortsighted and naïve and futile.

Constance Reid, Neyman: From Life

August 10, 2010August 31, 2022/stevereads/Leave a comment

Standard boring academic cover, with basically just the words on a yellowy cover
Jerzy Neyman is one of those epochal researchers who developed tools that working scientists use every day, without necessarily knowing that they’re doing so. In 200 years they’ll still be using his tools, and he’ll have descended even more into the obscurity of constant use: mathematicians don’t need to write “quadratic reciprocity (Gauss, 1801)”; likewise, even when people have forgotten that it’s the Neyman-Pearson Lemma, they’ll still be using the Neyman-Pearson Lemma.

What this famous lemma gives us is a rigorous reason to use the particular statistical methods that we’d been using on intuitive grounds previously. It shows that in a certain well-defined sense, the best statistical test we can use is one based on likelihood ratios. A likelihood ratio, in turn, is the ratio of two probabilities: the probability that the data you see before you would have arisen under one hypothesis, divided by the probability that it would have arisen under another hypothesis. [1]

Neyman’s work laid the foundations of mathematical statistics, in the sense of deriving statistical results with the rigor of mathematicians. The decades following Neyman and Pearson’s work saw probability theory become rigorously grounded in measure theory, and saw statistics rigorously grounded in probability theory. And it saw statistical methods applied to countless problems well beyond gambling and agriculture. Neyman was at the center of all of this: he started what quickly became the world’s greatest center of statistical research, at Berkeley, and applied rigorous methods all the way from the foundations of statistics up to the structure of galaxies. He was, by any measure, an awe-inspiring scientist.

Constance Reid managed to catch Neyman while he was still alive. She interviewed him every Saturday toward the end of his life, and published the book soon after he died. Her biography isn’t scholarly, in the sense of digging very far into the content of his work. I think it’s fairer to call it an “academic” biography: it spends most of its time following Neyman’s university career, the conferences he organized, and the spats he got into with other statistical luminaries — principally the legendary R.A. Fisher, whose immortality in genetics is just as assured as it is in statistics. Fisher doesn’t come out looking very good under Reid’s lens: he’s bitter, condescending, egomaniacal, imperious, and unwilling to brook even the slightest disagreement on his work.

Reid has a bit of a fine line to toe: go into too much detail about the content of Neyman’s work and she’s likely to alienate general readers; go into too little detail and she’ll alienate technical readers. ([book: Neyman: From Life] is published by Springer-Verlag, the canonical publisher of math textbooks, so it’s clear that she has a technical audience in mind.) I think she stays too far on the non-technical side: we learn a lot about the conferences Neyman traveled to and the bureaucratic dust-ups he started at Berkeley, but very little about what, exactly, got Fisher and him so angry at each other. Was it that Fisher came from an earlier era when intuitive derivations of statistical results were acceptable? Was it that Fisher found Neyman’s methods appropriate for large samples but useless for small ones? Did it have something to do with “fiducial inference,” which is a Fisher innovation that I’ve never seen anyone explain clearly? (Check out its Wikipedia entry and try to explain to me what “fiducial inference” even means.) It’s not always clear that Reid herself knows the answers to these questions, and from time to time she describes Neyman glossing over some details during their interviews; he may not have thought much of her technical chops either.

That’s really a small gripe, of course: most people really will not need the kind of intellectual biography that I hoped to find. Instead they’ll meet a statistician who’s still unfairly productive in his 80s, whom the university can’t possibly let go of without forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money and a world-renowned conference every year. [2] Neyman seems like a perfectly lovable [foreign: mensch], ambling about with his cigarettes, prodding students into doing math at the blackboard, and traveling everywhere with his “long-time collaborator and constant companion”, Professor Betty Scott.

(Reid’s coverage of Neyman’s private life is hilariously restrained. It would seem, on the basis of a few hints from others throughout the book, that Neyman was something of a ladies’ man. Reid seems to have shied away from asking Neyman’s wife what she thought about this; either that, or she avoided writing any of it down.)

Reid’s book has certainly rekindled my love for mathematical statistics, which I enjoyed studying so much at Carnegie Mellon. I’m definitely going to revisit the subject now that I’m older and maybe marginally smarter.

[1] — Here I simply must link to Cosma Shalizi’s clever derivation of the Neyman-Pearson Lemma on economic grounds.

[2] — The *full text* of the Proceedings of the Berkeley Symposia on Mathematical Statistics and Probability is available online? That’s several thousand pages. It contains many groundbreaking papers, among them the one in which Charles Stein introduced what we now call Stein’s Paradox. Amazing.

David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace

July 31, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

A photo of David Foster Wallace in his study/office. His chair faces our right, and his head is turned right to face the camera. He's holding his black lab on his lap. Wallace's face looks a bit tired.
Anyone who loved David Foster Wallace while he was alive will find this book both very charming and very painful. What [book: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself] shows very clearly is that David Foster Wallace was the same person in real life that he was on the page. His fans already knew this: the great charm of [book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again] — particularly the title essay, which is one of the most gut-bustingly hilarious things you’ll ever read — is that Wallace is like an extremely smart, articulate, verbose, overeducated, humorous friend of yours, walking alongside you and pointing out things about the world around you that you would have missed. You figure out right away that there’s no way Wallace could have faked this on the page.

In [book: Although Of Course], we join Wallace on a book tour for [book: Infinite Jest], his magnum opus about late-20th-century America. [mag: Rolling Stone] has asked David Lipsky to follow Wallace around for a few days on the tour; a road trip ensues. We follow Wallace and Lipsky in cars, on planes, on smoke breaks outside of hotels, and in diners, and we get the largely unedited transcript of their conversation.

The effect is that I love Wallace even more now that it’s over, and could do without David Lipsky. I wanted Lipsky to disappear from the narrative, except that I wanted him to ask more interesting questions. He spends what seems to me like an absurd amount of time asking Wallace how he was dealing with so much fame: Wallace here was at his peak, having been featured on the cover of [mag: Time] magazine (among others). Lipsky’s probing here feels like he’s following around a starlet who’s known for trips into and out of rehab, and continually asking her, “Do you miss alcohol? Would you really like a drink right now? Oh man, you must be thirsty. How about a drink? No, just water. Ha ha. Mind if I have some gin from this flask? Don’t mind me, I’ll just have a drink.” Lipsky is after something, and it’s not clear what. Yes, [book: Infinite Jest] — the instant cause of the road trip — is about American addictions, including addictions to fame, but Lipsky’s questioning goes well beyond what the book itself warrants. He detects in Wallace a fear that becoming famous will take away from his writing, so he keeps poking and poking and poking at it — in the hopes of eliciting what, I don’t know.

The experience of reading a book like this is akin to that of watching a “behind-the-scenes” video from, say, the White House. If you’re like me, you never forget that there’s a camera there, and you never forget that everyone in the room *knows* a camera is there, and you never forget that no matter how much you tell people to “act natural,” they’ll always behave as though there’s a camera in the room. This book calls attention to the camera more than most, or in this case to the microphone: Lipsky transcribes every moment when Wallace asks him to turn off the mic, every moment when the recorder runs out of tape, every moment when Lipsky turns to the mic and adds some context to the transcript (“Here David is talking about…”). Wallace himself often remarks upon the device, and notes how flattering it is to have his every snort, sigh and eye roll scrupulously taken down.

While maybe interesting from some postmodern perspective (*the camera turns back on itself ::spooky involution::*), this makes for exceedingly distracting narration. The book was very consciously laid out as a nearly unedited travelogue, and you can think of various reasons why this might be a good way to do things. But most of the time, I wanted Lipsky to use some authorial discretion. We don’t need to know every time that Wallace coughed. I am sorry to break this news to Lipsky, but it is true.

All that said, [book: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself] is worthwhile reading because Wallace himself is such a fascinating subject. There’s probably no one with whom I’d rather have gone on a road trip. If Lipsky is up for it, I’d gladly edit this book into a better one that doesn’t feature Lipsky at all. Probably no use waiting by the phone for his call.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

July 10, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Wodehouse sitting in a suit, hunched over somewhat, or maybe sitting Indian-style, elbows on knees, looking to his right at the camera. It's hard to see in this image, but it's as though we're viewing Wodehouse through many very fine Venetian blinds.

I finally got around to reading Wodehouse! I’ve not known where to start for so many years, and as I’ve mentioned before I’m highly sensitive to the first book I read by an author. If it’s a terrible book — if, say, I’d started my Philip Roth career with the quite awful [book: Plot Against America] — I’m likely never to read anything by that author again. I was concerned that the same would happen with Wodehouse.

I needn’t have feared. My sense, after reading this absolutely delightful story, novel, and autobiographical-essay anthology, is that the bulk of Wodehouse’s stories are essentially the same and are all pure joy. It’s not fair to call Wodehouse a “one-trick pony,” because the real trick that makes all his stories work is an effortless command of English prose. It’s just that the skeleton of the stories, if this anthology is any indication, is more or less the same. I couldn’t have been happier during the hours I spent in Wodehouse’s company.

The structure is like so. Some young member of the English upper class is hard up for money, his allowance from a rich uncle having been frittered away gambling on horses. He’s not so bad off, you’ll understand — his valet still attends to his every need, and his time is spent sauntering from one leisurely meal over one linen tablecloth to another. In fact his needs are so taken care of that he pines — whether or not he acknowledges it — for a bit of spice.

The spice typically comes in the form of a girl he wants to marry, or in some scheme that his (likewise entirely-taken-care-of) aunt hatches. The novel that begins this anthology, for instance, is entirely ridiculous and centers on a “cow creamer” that Wooster’s aunt covets. She commands Wooster to steal it. And why would he do such a thing? Well, because she holds the sword of Damocles over his head: if he doesn’t steal it, she’ll deny him any future meals prepared by her godlike French chef, Anatole. That settles it for Wooster: he will steal that cow-creamer. Anything for Anatole.

A black British policeman's helmet, the strap peeking out from under, big silver badge on the front From there we head down endless ridiculous paths. Wooster, during an earlier moment of debauchery, tried to steal a policeman’s helmet and thereby drew the judge’s undying enmity. Through various [foreign: dei ex machina], he ends up needing to do the very same thing again. I think he gets engaged a couple times in there.

What exactly happens doesn’t matter. What makes these stories endless fun is watching Wodehouse pull the strings and lead you through ever more confusing paths. It’s maybe the reverse of a mystery novel: you keep your eyes peeled throughout a mystery novel to see where the big important clue is, knowing all along that it’s The Person You Never Expected at the very end; in Wodehouse you convince yourself, at every fleeting “well, I guess that mess is over with” moment, that the mess really is over with, only to find a moment later that Wooster is back in the soup.

Jeeves saves everything at the end, of course. Jeeves saves things repeatedly throughout all the Jeeves/Wooster stories. He’s the ultimate, patient, wise, unerring butler. Once during this anthology, Jeeves was off on a vacation somewhere, but eventually Wodehouse realized that this just wouldn’t do: Jeeves came back and saved the day again.

The novel near the end of this anthology — [book: Uncle Fred in the Springtime] — does without Jeeves or Wooster. Instead it features the kindly, doddering old Ninth Earl of Emsworth and the perpetually youthful Fifth Early of Ickenham. These are two wonderful characters who recur in several stories throughout the collection; as with every other story here, they are pure delight. Emsworth is basically senile and mostly deaf; he lives with Constance, his harpy of a sister. She controls everything he does, except for those occasions when she steps out for a bit and the old man does something silly, like shoot his private secretary with an air gun (see “The Crime Wave at Blandings” — see, in general, any number of entertainments that take place at Blandings).

The Earl of Ickenham is similarly situated but not so doddering as the Ninth Earl; whenever his relative (wife, sister, it doesn’t really matter — she exists in these stories to step out at opportune moments) disappears, he finds an excuse to pull his shy, perpetually nervous nephew, Pongo, into a trip to London. These trips rejuvenate the old man, and he finds some new inventive way to make trouble every time. In one story he schemes his and Pongo’s way into a house while pretending to be parrot groomers. [book: Uncle Fred in the Springtime], by contrast, is 200 pages of Ickenham’s scheming — a smile on his face throughout, pretending to be someone new as the situation calls for it, getting everyone out of scrapes through his ingenious improvising. He’s the Jeeves character in these stories, though he’s sprightly and voluble while Jeeves is as careful and standoffish as you’d expect from the perfect valet. In any case, they both specialize in using their speedy brains to get others out of trouble.

The plot matters little in these stories. One, “The Amazing Hat Mystery,” goes like this: two gentlemen — one tall with a massive head, the other short with a little head — buy hats from London’s premier hat-maker; this is the king’s own hat-provider, we’re given to understand. The hats are delivered a short time later. There is a mix-up, with the small hat going to the big man and the big hat to the small. The gentlemen each head out to woo their respective love interests: the tall man is in love with the short woman, the short man with the tall. The respective ladies tell their respective gentlemen that their respective hats are vastly mis-sized: the one looks like a thimble atop the massive man’s head, while the other comes down to the small man’s knees. Both gentlemen take great umbrage at the shot that’s been fired across the bow of London’s premier hat-maker. Both assert the impossibility of a mis-sized hat. Both storm out of their partners’ company, declaring the end of each love affair. They retire to the same public house to drown their sorrows. They hang up their hats on the hat rack. As they leave, they each pick up the right hat. On the street, the tall man runs into the tall woman, the short man into the short woman. Each woman compliments each man on the perfection of his hat. Each man and each woman finds his or her proper mate. No one ever figures out why the hats initially failed to do the trick. The end.

You know from the start of this story how it’s going to work out. The great trick that Wodehouse pulls off is that he’s a magician of the obvious story. He’s laid out all his cards within the first couple pages, yet you are unavoidably hooked. Over and over throughout this anthology, I lost myself in the story — and in Wodehouse’s effortless prose — within moments. 800 pages, containing two novels, 14 short stories, and an autobiographical afterword, flew by.

Now I’m a member of the Church of Wodehouse. I have no choice but to read everything he wrote.

Steve Reads

Category: Books