Steve Reads

In lieu of proper reviews — October 30, 2015

In lieu of proper reviews

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Attention-conservation notice: capsule reviews of 12 books that I’ve read this year, averaging 250 words apiece. This isn’t a complete list of books I’ve read this year — just the books that I a) hadn’t yet reviewed, b) felt great shame in having not yet reviewed, c) still remembered well enough, and d) felt strongly about in one direction or another.

Having just finished a book, and seeing that I’ve read a bunch of books without reviewing them, I’m going to throw some really quick capsule reviews in here.

  • Oliver Sacks, “Uncle Tungsten”: just finished this tonight. Truly remarkable. Unlike anything I’ve ever read. If you combined “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” with … I dunno, maybe “An American Childhood” (but in Britain … and only ending a few years after World War II), you’d get Sacks’s book. It’s scientifically rigorous, makes the science exciting, is deeply personal about Sacks’s family, and really draws a lot of parallels between the scientific community and the community of scientists in his family who gave him endless support as his interest in chemistry developed.

    Sacks wrote elsewhere, heartbreakingly, of his parents’ reaction when he revealed to them that he was gay: his mother declared him an abomination and said she wished he’d never been born. His attitude toward his parents in “Uncle Tungsten” is almost reverent, and certainly always respectful; it may not be coincidental that the story in “Uncle Tungsten” ends before he turns 18.

  • Oliver Sacks, “Migraine”. Interesting in a lot of ways, but too clinically written — seemingly with only a specialist audience in mind — to recommend. Though the details about migraine auras — which sometimes include others’ faces dissolving into mosaics, or time itself fracturing like the frames of a film — are fascinating.

  • John Maynard Keynes, “Essays In Persuasion”. These are essays starting at the Versailles Treaty and ending in the early 30s. The Versailles era is covered in Keynes’s startling “Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which I’d recommend without reservation. The “Essays In Persuasion” argue passionately that Britain should get off the gold standard, and that it should continue to spend to put people to work; without much modification, I think these essays could have been spoken by Paul Krugman from 2009 to now. They contain some of Keynes’s most famous lines, such as when he refers to the gold standard as a “barbarous relic” or calms readers during the Depression when he tells them that “the resources of nature and men’s devices would be just as fertile and productive as they were. The machine would merely have been jammed as the result of a muddle.”

  • Annie Dillard, “An American Childhood”: kinda fun, but felt like it was trying too hard. In general it’s a book about a child slowly coming to discover herself. Near the start is a pretty clever and engrossing scene, in which Dillard sees a shadow monster climb from the foot of her bed and up the wall of her bedroom before disappearing, and screams for her parents to come protect her. This happens night after night before Dillard realizes that the monster comes from the headlights of passing cars. This is the beginning of her self-awareness. She becomes progressively more human throughout the book, enters her teenage years, and experiences an uncontrollable rage. We leave her when she’s just beginning to regain control.

    Despite the occasional bursts of cleverness, I can’t recommend this book. It didn’t hold my interest. As always, this is likely as much about me as about the author.

  • Daniel Okrent, “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition”: I knew — we all know — that Prohibition was a disastrous failure, that it led to the rise of the Mafia, etc. I don’t think I realized just how farcically bad a failure it was. Daniel Okrent is practically giggling throughout “Last Call”: Prohibition didn’t work, it was never going to work, and there was never any mystery about whether it would eventually work. Okrent creates a bit of suspense here and there, as when a tough-as-nails administrator joins the FBI (I believe it was the FBI — forgive me; it’s been a couple months since I read it, and I’m trying to dash these off without checking sources) and for a moment you think, “Here’s where it’s going to turn around.” But no: it was never going to turn around. The loopholes were there from the beginning: for sacramental wine, for industrial alcohol, etc. Indeed, some of the most horrifying parts of Okrent’s book were tied up with these loopholes — as when the government added toxic chemicals to industrial alcohol so that it couldn’t easily be turned into drinkable alcohol, and consequently killed thousands of people. The government was so eager to morally purify Americans that it intentionally caused their deaths.

    Prohibition, in Okrent’s telling, could only have happened through the confluence of three forces: women’s suffrage, racism, and the income tax. Women were the natural advocates for Prohibition, since they suffered from their husbands’ drunken rampages. Advocates of Prohibition knew this, so they fought hard to get women the vote. And once women did get the vote, they lined up for Prohibition as expected. Racism’s role was to play on ugly stereotypes, particularly the animalistic black man who, under the influence of drink, would perform his savage acts upon pure white women. And the income tax was necessary to replace income lost from the departed alcohol tax; fortunately World War I came along and made the income tax necessary.

    There’s loads more I could comment on here, including Okrent’s history of the Bronfman (aka Seagram’s) family’s ill-gotten gains. And for that matter, all the fascinating parts about ships lining up three miles offshore in international waters, filled to the brim with fifths of bootlegged whiskey. (The boundary of international waters is now twelve miles out, in no small part so that little U.S. boats would have to go through more work to reach the bootleggers.) It’s a delightful and infuriating parade of pitch-perfect storytelling. Just an extraordinary book, with the passion of a moral crusader and the journalist’s eye for the perfect, evocative detail. Recommended in the strongest terms.

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”: this is a brutal, honest letter from a black father in the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, explaining to his son that white society has always tried to control black bodies and would always try to control black bodies. It’s part rationally controlled rage, part historical consciousness, and essentially pure poetry. He writes it from a bleak time in American history, and he pulls no punches. I read it on a long train ride while my partner slept beside me, and I was filled with a bottomless sadness; there’s not much room in Coates’s book for hope. Hope is what a Martin Luther King would experience, whereas someone like Malcolm X would view the world in material, visceral terms: these are our bodies, and white society exercises its power over those bodies.

    It’s a must-read, but as a white man I left it feeling sad and powerless. Coates would seem to say that white America is just confused about the lives of black Americans. His own dawning consciousness came through reading Garvey, Fanon, and others while at Howard University, but much more of that consciousness came through — again — watching white America destroy the bodies of his friends. There’s no way I’ll ever experience that constant feeling that my body is not my own. Merely reading what Garvey had to say will never get me a visceral experience of life as a black man.

  • Adam Swift, “How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent”. The most important thing that this book probably brings to a lot of people is that there is a morally perplexing aspect to sending your kids to private school if you, at the same time, feel that public schools are worth supporting (in the abstract). The moral dilemma is, of course, that you know that it would be better for everyone if the public schools had rich kids alongside poor kids, black kids alongside white kids, and you simultaneously want what’s best for your kids.

    To the extent that I understand Swift’s argument, it’s that you only have a right to demand so much for your kids. In part this is because schooling has some aspects of a “positional good”: school is valuable for me inasmuch as my kid gets ahead, which means that my kid does better in school than yours does. But of course you feel the same way. The result is that some part of schooling is a pure zero-sum game: my kid can only get ahead to the extent that your kid falls behind. On the other side, there’s the aspect of education that is truly nourishing to the child; you should be entitled to as much of that as you can get, so long as in doing so you’re not depriving anyone else’s child of it.

    This quickly turns from philosophical questions to empirical ones. Am I, essentially, entitled to claim a marginal unit of quality for the education of my child so long as I subtract less than a unit of quality from the education of everyone else’s? And is private school really so much better than public school? Or is it just that private school gets richer, whiter, better-prepared students with more-involved parents than public schools do? If so, maybe the problem with your sending kids to private schools isn’t that you’re a hypocrite; it’s that you’re wrong.

    It’s a book by a philosopher, so it doesn’t spend a lot of time engaging with the empirical evidence (as, say, a Diane Ravitch would); Swift, I think, views his role as clearing away the dross of bad arguments, which would then leave room for matters of empirical evidence to be argued more directly. It’s not clear to me that the philosophical argument here is really necessary — the empirical arguments for public schools seem more convincing than the philosophical ones — but every little bit helps.

    (I’ve been using educational comparisons — white students versus black students, etc. — that are relevant in the U.S. context. Swift’s book is written from a UK perspective, but you can divide through to get the U.S. analogue.)

  • Rob Delaney, “Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.”: If you know the comedian on Twitter, I imagine you already love him. He’s filthy and absurd. His book is funny, but it’s really the story of how the author, an alcoholic, hit rock bottom and struggled out. If you like him on Twitter, you really need to read the book. If you don’t know him on Twitter, you should remedy that.

  • Ernest Gellner, “Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History”: this book is too intricate to go into in the space I’ve allotted myself, and to be honest I need to give it a second reading; it would be well worth the effort. Gellner also gave us “Nations and Nationalism”, which is a little book that has lodged itself in my brain in the few years since I read it.

    In Nations and Nationalism, Gellner gives us a disarmingly simple model of where nationalism comes from. Essentially capitalism begets nations. First capitalism upends the static pattern of history, whereby a son can expect to do the same work that his father and grandfather did. The son also needn’t expect to live where his ancestors lived. The constant destruction of old industries means that workers must be able to retrain, at least once per generation, for the new work that capitalism demands of them. This, in turn, demands mass education. Mass education demands a common language. There’s a bit of the argument in here that I can’t reconstruct from memory, namely: how do we get from “all these people must share a common language” to “the people who share this common language must therefore be their own nation”? Apart from “the language constructs an imaginary grouping of people who come to believe they share Englishness or Frenchness or Germanness”, the path isn’t totally clear to me.

    Gellner’s stock-in-trade are these sorts of large questions. In N&N, the large question was how nations form. In “Plough, Sword, and Book” it’s the intellectual structure of human history. Gellner contrasts today’s “single-stranded” rationality, in which all experiences, facts, and arguments must be subjected the same Enlightenment-derived standard of evidence, to earlier societies’ “multi-stranded” perceptions of the world. In a multi-stranded understanding, it’s okay to treat religious statements as, say, metaphors, while putting empirical reality in its own bucket. Post-Enlightenment rationality simply won’t allow this division.

    Gellner wouldn’t quite echo Schumpeter here, but Schumpeter saw something analogous happening: capitalist rationality had driven away all modes of reasoning apart from cost-benefit calculations. We’re now all good little utilitarians, even in the decision of whether to have kids or how many to have. This is such a part of our wiring now that it would seem absurd to treat the decision any other way.

    Gellner has a weird habit of rarely allowing himself a proper noun: “This perpetuated, at the level of national politics, the idea that military power and territorial expansion were paramount goals and/or the conditions of prosperity. The brilliant postwar economic performance of the two prime losers of [World War II], deprived of all empire (and more), finally put paid to this illusion.” Would it have killed him to have written “Germany and Japan”? This replacement of proper nouns with disguised definite descriptions is meant, I think, to lend his books some abstraction and some timelessness, but often it just removes some of the grounding that would make them easier to reason through.

  • Ammon Shea, “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages”: It’s what you’d expect, namely a curio cabinet of words that the author found interesting, and his observations on them. It’s a two-legged stool; one leg is how interesting the words are, and the other is how tiresome the author is. The author tries to affect a persona of being generally an introvert and a hater of humanity, and I don’t doubt to some degree that he is; hard to see how someone who loved being out in the world would agree to spend a year holed up in libraries or his apartment with his walls of dictionaries. But it seems mostly affected; I think Shea is probably a nice guy, despite his best attempts to pretend otherwise.

    (Shea was on You’re The Expert, and he was charming. His wife, to whom he referred repeatedly throughout “Reading The OED” when they weren’t yet married, appeared on YTE a few weeks earlier; she was also delightful.)

  • Hans Zinsser, “Rats, Lice, and History”: Zinsser tells us that the often-unmentioned prime mover behind much of human history is epidemic disease, particularly typhus. Zinsser’s experience here is not purely academic: he worked during World War I as sanitation inspector of the Second Army, and kept thousands of soldiers from dying. Contrast this with the Civil War where (if memory serves) Zinsser tells us that twice as many soldiers died of disease as died at the wrong end of a rifle. Napoleon’s retreat from Russia also had a lot to do with raging infectious disease among his troops.

    Part of why disease is so underreported as a crucial part of military success or failure might be that we like to focus on individual acts of valor rather than unromantic things like disease control or logistics. We’ve all read a lot about the brave American soldier storming the beaches at Normandy, but quite a lot less about how, say, the Office of Price Control managed to control inflation while the nation’s factories churned out vast quantities of military materiel.

    And when public health succeeds, it’s invisible: thousands or millions of people don’t get sick. Whereas when a doctor saves just one patient’s life, he’s revered as a saint and a genius. I hypothesize that this is connected to the American epidemic of naïve and infantile libertarianism, but I don’t have the space to expand on that right now.

  • Katha Pollitt, “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights”:

    1. Abortion is actively good
    2. It should be considered unapologetically as part of the repertoire of useful birth control
    3. The cloak of regret that American culture hangs around abortion is unfounded and not borne out by the actual experiences of women who’ve had abortions.
    4. Third-trimester abortions, which are the ones that seem to horrify so many people, and around which so many people focus their opposition to abortion, are vanishingly rare. To the extent that they happen, they happen because women are genuinely unaware that they’re pregnant, and because state laws mandate waiting periods for abortions that push abortions into the third trimester.
    5. Liberals have been in a defensive crouch on abortion for decades, and they shouldn’t be. It’s time to take back abortion as a positive good.
    6. Reluctance to claim abortion as a positive good is tied up with the general war on women, whereby men insist upon the legal right — only recently revoked — to control women’s bodies.

    Everyone should read this book. You should read it in particular if, like me, you at some point felt it was the height of judicious centrism to say that you “support a woman’s right to choose, but feel uncomfortable with abortion.” Pollitt would say that that’s nonsense, and that your discomfort was put there by a dedicated, focused, decades-long campaign to demonize abortion and demonize the women who have them (while not, curiously, demonizing the men involved in the pregnancy). After reading “Pro,” I am 100% convinced.

Reading Donald Shoup really changes subsequent reading — October 26, 2015

Reading Donald Shoup really changes subsequent reading

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Having read The High Cost Of Free Parking changes the way you read articles about parking. For instance, when you read an article like this, containing a quote like this:

On the campaign trail two years ago, Walsh pledged to look for ways to increase parking spots in city neighborhoods.

“We have to try to make parking more accessible,” Walsh told the Herald in September 2013. “I hear it every single day out on the campaign, the lack of parking. It’s an issue in every single neighborhood.”

, you realize that there’s a missing implicit word in there. The word is ‘free’. The newspaper — and maybe vintage-2013 Mayor Walsh — seem to assume that free on-street parking is a god-given right. Whereas if you admit the possibility of charging for parking, another solution leaps out: you can make parking accessible by charging for spaces. Some people will choose not to own cars. Some people will pay to put their cars in off-street parking. Then you’ll get your accessible parking.

I think vintage-2015 Mayor Walsh gets it. The article centers on residents’ anger over the city’s leasing parking spots to the likes of Zipcar. Mayor Walsh responds exactly as he should:

“The way that we’re doing this is to cut down actually on people having to own cars and driving cars and in the long run, it’ll actually save cars coming into the North End. People will be able to take a car and share community cars.”

There’s what you might call a “fallacy of simplicity” in people’s reactions to a lot of policies, including this one. The fallacy of simplicity says that if you want to achieve x, the way to do it is to do something whose immediate effect is x. Want to increase parking? Simple: dedicate more land to parking spaces. (Harder, and more likely to be correct: make it easier for people to live in a city without owning a car.) Want to cut the Federal budget deficit during a recession? Simple: cut spending. (Harder, and more likely to be correct: spend more money on public works, which pumps money into the economy, which gets business going, which restores a self-reinforcing economic boom.) Mayor Walsh isn’t subscribing to the fallacy of simplicity here. He’s aiming to reduce parking use by reducing demand, rather than increasing supply. That’s the right idea.

But if we’re going to look for simple solutions, how about not allowing every home to own unlimited parking permits?

Or to quote Lewis Mumford (from “Babel in Europe”), “The main issue is that the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”

I haven’t climbed atop my Medicare hobbyhorse in a while, so why not now? — October 24, 2015

I haven’t climbed atop my Medicare hobbyhorse in a while, so why not now?

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A Politico article about Ben Carson’s plan to completely dismantle Medicare and Medicaid and replace them with savings accounts features the notable silence of all his Republican opponents, and this:

Carson’s GOP rivals are largely holding their fire so far. Trump’s campaign declined to comment, as did the campaigns of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio. A spokeswoman for Bobby Jindal noted the Louisiana governor’s support for reforming — but preserving — Medicare and Medicaid.

“Without change, they will go bankrupt,” said the spokeswoman, Shannon Dirmann. “Abolishing them is bad policy.”

The following needs to be repeated until we stop hearing nonsense like Ms. Dirmann’s, and until journalists cut that stuff off at the source: Medicare is only at risk of ‘going bankrupt’ because of how it’s financed. How it’s financed is not a fact of nature; it’s something we control.

To review: Medicare is divided into several parts. Part A pays for hospitalization. Part B pays for doctor visits. Part C is known as Medicare Advantage. Part D is for prescription drugs.

Now. Your paycheck contains a Medicare-tax piece. Today the rate is 1.45% for you, and 1.45% for your employer. That funds Part A. Which is to say: Part A has a dedicated funding source.

“So what about Parts B, C, and D?” you might ask. “Where do they get their money?” Their money comes out of general revenue. That is, Parts B-D are funded the same way the Department of Defense is funded. If the government spends more on jet fighters or Medicare Parts B-D in a given year than it budgeted for, then it funds the gap using debt.

Which is to say: the Department of Defense, by definition, cannot go bankrupt. Medicare Parts B-D, by definition, cannot go bankrupt.

The first thing to note, then, is that people should be a little clearer: when they say that ‘Medicare will go bankrupt’, what they mean is that Medicare Part A will go bankrupt. Medicare Parts B-D will never go bankrupt, because it is impossible for them to go bankrupt. Or rather, they will go bankrupt exactly when the rest of the U.S. government goes bankrupt. The U.S. government will go bankrupt when it no longer has access to enough money to fund continuing operations — i.e., when it can no longer tax, borrow, or inflate the currency enough to generate adequate revenue. And when that happens, we’ll have other problems on our hands.

The second thing to note is that the Department of Defense would also be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy if we funded it through a dedicated ‘DoD tax’ on your paycheck. I will never tire of comparing Federal programs to the DoD, because that department seems to be treated as though it were incomparable. (Note the pernicious habit of discussing “non-defense discretionary spending.”) We could manufacture a false DoD crisis if we stuck a ‘DoD tax’ line item on everyone’s paycheck, required the DoD to only fund itself from that line item, and set the line item to a low number. The next time we had a recession, lots of people would lose their jobs, which would lower tax revenue (because fewer jobs means less employment income), which would cause everyone to run around in a panic, wondering how in the world we’ll ever fend off DoD bankruptcy.

The Medicare ‘bankruptcy’ scare is an artificial crisis. It is simply an artifact of how we choose to count things. We could trivially end that scare tomorrow: write a bill declaring that Medicare Part A is hereafter funded the same way parts B-D have always been funded. Crisis: ended.

It’s not surprising that the GOP wants to keep us scared. It’s somewhat more surprising that someone like President Obama isn’t calmly explaining the fictional crisis to the American people. If I were in a really idealistic mood, I’d wonder why candidates don’t also repeatedly say, “It’s funny that funds are always available for war, but that paying to provide a good life for our citizens is somehow the height of fiscal irresponsibility.” But we all know why that is.

I don’t think I’m out of line when I say that this scandal makes Benghazi look like Whitewater — October 23, 2015
I think I’m a Hillary voter —

I think I’m a Hillary voter

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I was already going to vote for her, were she the Democratic nominee. But then I read the transcript of the first Democratic debate, where Bernie — despite how much I enjoy that cantankerous personality — did not acquit himself well, and Hillary showed herself absolutely in command.

Then there was today’s Benghazi hearing. What a spectacularly terrible joke, delivered by a roomful of defective assclowns. Would that we devoted a hearing — and built an entire Congressional committee around — the lies that got us into the Iraq War. (Four people died at Benghazi. Thousands had died in Iraq by 2013.)

Anyway, Hillary behaved in a statesmanlike way. And I’m realizing that the main gripe that anyone has about her — that she is, in some vague way, “untrustworthy” — is entirely a Republican invention; the media have beaten that drum for so many years that few people realize it’s been manufactured from thin air.

I’ll do the appropriate research, and I’ve not 100% made up my mind yet, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that none of the other candidates — in either party — holds a candle to Hillary in accomplishments or command of the issues.

A cynical take on limiting Social Security eligibility — October 22, 2015

A cynical take on limiting Social Security eligibility

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Eric Laursen today describes the GOP desire to limit Social Security only to those people who are too sick to work, then goes into the research describing why it’s not so easy to identify who’s too sick to work. He doesn’t say so (Jacob Hacker does, I believe in The Great Risk Shift), but the same is true of income variability. We might have a mental model of “the poor” as those who always and everywhere have low income, and there may be such people, but there are a great many more who suffer periodic negative shocks to their income. (Same sort of thing is true of “the homeless”; see Malcolm Gladwell.)

So here’s my cynical take:

  1. Sorting out eligible from the ineligible requires huge administrative overhead rather than simple age-based eligibility. This is exactly what the GOP wants: a Federal program that works poorly. Two examples of the GOP playbook come to mind here. First, consider their demand that abortions be allowed only when the mother’s life is in danger. Along with all the other things we could say about this, just imagine the regulatory and legal overhead it creates; how many times will doctors be sued because they allowed an abortion when the mother’s life wasn’t at risk? Even if they always win those lawsuits, a great many doctors will opt out of providing abortions purely to avoid a lawsuit.

    Second, I think of Bill Kristol’s famous memo on defeating the Clinton health-insurance initiative, particularly this:

    “Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton… and for the Democratic Party.” So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president’s strategist and pollster. If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right. Because the initiative’s inevitably destructive effect on American medical services will not be practically apparent for several years–no Carter-like gas lines, in other words–its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse–much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

    What possible interpretation of this paragraph could there be other than “it will work, so we have to defeat it”?

    The ease of separating eligible from ineligible is one of the big arguments for single-payer health care, by the way. Hospitals will no longer have to employ teams of people who specialize in dealing with individual insurers; there will be just the one insurer. And identifying eligibility is easy: you’re a citizen, so you’re eligible. There may be other knocks against single-payer health care, but low administrative overhead is one of its main selling points.

  2. There’s a maxim that “a program for the poor becomes a poor program”. A great way to remove mass support from Social Security is to isolate its constituency. If it’s those people over there who get Social Security rather than you and me, then we’re less willing to fight for what’s ours. If this model is right, then increasing the generosity of Social Security — so long, of course, as the funding increases commensurately — might raise its likelihood of survival, by increasing the political support behind it.

    Consider: when the average Social Security benefit is $1335 a month, you and I might fight for it; but if it gives us a hefty monthly payout in retirement, we might fight a lot harder. What would “hefty monthly payout in retirement” mean? Well, the usual story is that you should save enough to earn 80% of your pre-retirement income in retirement. Median household income nationwide is $53,046 per year. 80% of that is $3,536.40. How hard would you be willing to fight for Social Security if you knew that you’d be receiving $3500 per month from it in retirement?

    And that’s not at all an insane number to expect. Social Security was assumed to be part of a three-legged stool of retirement savings: your company’s pension, your savings, and Social Security. Pensions have significantly weakened, and 401(k)s have not kept up. (I’ll want to look around for the numbers: total assets held in defined-benefit retirement vehicles and total assets held in defined-contribution vehicles over time.) As for the saving rate: I’ve not looked into how it’s defined, but this quick FRED graph doesn’t say anything optimistic. So why not increase the monthly Social Security payout to 80% of the monthly median household income?

    My model of political support might be wrong, of course: that maxim needs to be backed up by empirical support. But enough people believe it’s true that I read a book a few years ago, a significant part of which was devoted to understanding why Medicaid is still alive. Shouldn’t Medicaid have become “a poor program” long ago?

The more our welfare-state programs apply to everyone, I believe, the more politically secure they’ll become. And along the way, they’ll be cheaper to administer. We should all want these things.

John Oliver on the Canadian election — October 20, 2015
File under “cult of the presidency” — October 19, 2015

File under “cult of the presidency”

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Matt Yglesias has an important post this morning. He observes that Democrats are in the minority basically everywhere — in state houses, in governors’ mansions, and in the House of Representatives — and yet the party is engaged in a surreal debate over, as Yglesias puts it, “whether they should go a little bit to Obama’s left or a lot to his left” in Hillary or Bernie, respectively.

Yglesias drew some fire recently for a post that seems very connected to this latest one, wherein he noted that any successful Democratic president will have to operate mostly through executive orders, and that Hillary has shown herself particularly adept at handling those levers of power. The critics misunderstood him: he’s not happy about this. He’s on the record, indeed, with a post simply titled American democracy is doomed. The sort of (small-d) democracy wherein the executive branch has to operate mostly via executive order to get anything done is not a healthy one.

So at best, the Democrats can hope for little bits of change here and there, which will be stopped at the House of Representatives. Another option: a Republican president, Republican House, and Democratic Senate; along this avenue, the best Democrats can hope for is that the party gets to stop everything at the Senate door via the filibuster. (I’ll go on the record here: I want to see the filibuster ended, and I don’t want to see my party use it. I’d rather have representative democracy, wherein parties are elected and allowed to pass their agendas, and then voted out if the public doesn’t support that agenda. Instead we have the Republic of the Filibuster, wherein the public votes in a party and then is surprised when nothing is accomplished.) Worst, of course, would be a Republican lock on both houses of Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Supreme Court.

Yet when it still seemed like something that might happen, I had many conversations about whether Elizabeth Warren would run for president. Sure, I’d love a President Warren, and so would most everyone I know. The idea of a Warren presidency comes, unfortunately, from an infantile place: we expect that the president will solve all our problems. We expect an Aaron Sorkin presidency made flesh. Whereas in reality what the Democrats need is to build institutions. We need the steady accretion of power in the Senate. We need to undo gerrymandering in state houses. And yes, we need a president who knows exactly which executive-branch levers are available to her.

The president is not going to fix all our problems. The power of the presidency doesn’t operate through some invisible magic channel that only presidents have access to. And while I agree with Bernie that we’re not going to accomplish anything until Americans are organized, I’m doubtful that Bernie or Warren can singlehandedly orchestrate that long, hard work of organizing. The sooner we realize that a president is not going to be the liberal savior, the sooner we’ll start the grubby work of building liberal institutions up and down the ticket.

Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City — October 17, 2015

Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City

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Lime-green background, black text. Outline of a cloverleaf highway.

The thing to note about Lewis Mumford is that above all else he’s a moral theorist. This observation changes his books from what might otherwise seem like mere catalogs of architectural mistakes into something much more vital. He observes societies’ moral rot — the two books of Mumford’s that I’ve read don’t document any other direction of moral change — through the way they build their cities. And there’s a lot to be said for this point of view. If, like Mumford, you believe that the city is a place where people come together to form a community that’s much greater than the individuals who comprise it, then we’re not just talking about beautiful or ugly buildings and congested or empty roads; we’re talking about nothing less than the structure of civilization itself.

Even if you accept this in principle, it’s hard not to perceive cities in much more limited terms; I’m certainly guilty of this in day-to-day life. A city is a place where lots of people happen to live together; they are, more or less, just places where commerce happens. Cities are where you can go to buy more-interesting foods and expensive coffees. They’re where you go shopping. They’re where some beautiful homes are. At best they’re where you find gorgeous neighborhoods. That impoverishes much of the dialogue over the direction in which we should take our cities. On the one hand, these days, you very often have people arguing that home prices are too high, and that a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient!) way to solve this is to build more housing. I certainly make this point a lot, and I’m most familiar with it coming from Matt Yglesias.

On the other side you have people who make, to my eye, mostly incoherent arguments: the city is already too crowded (tell that to those who lived here in 1950, shortly before Mumford compiled this book); public services are already terrible, and more people will just make them worse (so improve the services!). Beneath this there may lurk the sort of moral argument that Mumford is making, but it doesn’t come out often enough.

I agree with some of Mumford’s proposed solutions, but I’m at least skeptical of the others. On the skeptical end of things: he believes that people shouldn’t live at densities of greater than 100 people per acre, which is about 64,000 people per square mile. I think you have to view this as a moral argument for it to really make sense: Mumford wonders, essentially, what the point of all this density is. Merely throwing people into a gigantic high-rise doesn’t create a community; those people may be just as isolated from one another as if they lived in the remote countryside. So along with all the housing, Mumford wants spaces where people can both ennoble themselves and enlarge their communities — parks, for instance. The appropriately designed park is healthy for the individual people in it, and gives them space to interact.

You can’t have a healthy park if the air is filled with fumes from automobiles; on this I couldn’t agree more with Mumford. I quote here one of many passages from Mumford that left me yelling, “Yes! This!”:

Like the railroad, again, the motorway has repeatedly taken possession of the most valuable recreation space the city possesses, not merely by thieving land once dedicated to park uses, but by cutting off easy access to the waterfront parks, and lowering their value for refreshment and repose by introducing the roar of traffic and the bad odor of exhausts, though both noise and carbon monoxide are inimical to health. Witness the shocking spoilage of the Charles River basin parks in Boston …

This, mind you, was written in 1958, 30 years after Helen Osborne Storrow donated $1,000,000 toward the beautification of the Esplanade and, while she was alive, objected to plans to build a road through it. It’s a cruel irony that a few years after she died, a road called Storrow Drive tore through that beautiful park. This is the sort of wanton destruction that Mumford observed just a few years later.

The automobile is the antithesis of the city that Mumford wants — the city that elevates the person. The automobile atomizes us, disconnects us as a society, pollutes our collective air, and frays our nerves as individuals. It has also slaughtered the American city. It may seem overwrought when Mumford puts automobiles in the same bucket as atomic weapons — which he does, repeatedly, throughout The Highway and the City. In fact he puts many of our society’s most destructive technologies and inclinations in that bucket. I believe he’s referring to something much greater than mere machinery when he discusses “the machine” or “technics”. He’s referring, I think, to the attitude of a society that finds one thing to optimize, then monomaniacally focuses on that one thing while destroying everything else; this is part of what Ernest Gellner referred to (not at all disparagingly) in Plough, Sword, and Book as the “single-stranded thinking” of post-Enlightenment rationalist thought. The Manhattan Project is the absurdly logical conclusion of that path; it is what results from committing 1 in every 250 dollars of national product to the task of efficient destruction. It is the engineer’s mindset made flesh: given this goal, this technology will get you there in the time allotted. Likewise, given the desire to move isolated individuals trapped in their private motorcars as fast as possible from point A to point B, this highway will do the job for you. Both of these ignore the broader world that they’ve created: a world in which the power to destroy all humanity lies anxiously in wait for someone to pull the trigger, or a world in which highways tear gashes through the city and still remain gridlocked.

Half of Mumford’s solution makes sense to me and half does not. The half that makes sense seems obvious to modern eyes: reduce drastically our dependence upon the automobile. Make our cities safe for pedestrians again. Resurrect our crumbling mass-transit systems. The half that doesn’t make sense centers on that 100-people-per-acre bit. In order to achieve that goal, he suggests — is forced to suggest — thinning out cities. They’d be thinned out, though, in a more-planned way than what we landed on in the U.S., namely moving people to car-dependent suburbs. Instead Mumford would have cities ringed by closely connected small towns, each with the parks and so forth that he views as so vital for the ennoblement of the person.

Here’s where he runs into Jane Jacobs; I had to revisit the index to Death and Life of Great American Cities to remind myself (if I ever knew it) that she and Mumford didn’t see eye to eye. Jacobs is basically an anarchist; she (and Jim Scott) believes that cities adopt the order that makes sense to them at the day-to-day street level. Based on what she’s seen of Moses and Haussmann, it’s only the eye of the planner, believing itself in command of greater intelligence than the grubby hordes, that views the city as chaotic and in need of rationalization. Sometimes the planner has the right idea — as when Mumford envisions a city with far fewer personal automobiles — but in some sense that’s accidental. The people, Jacobs would say, know what they need out of their city, and the planner merely imposes his own plan on their needs. Mumford would have to agree with at least part of this: anyone watching highways being erected throughout the United States in the 50s was witnessing planning run amok. On the other hand, Mumford had the sort of mind that envisioned a ring of green sub-cities; his was the mind of a large-scale engineer.

(An economist — Ed Glaeser, say — would side with Jacobs, and would ask: if typical urban densities are so bad, then why do people keep crowding in? He would turn this same question toward, say, the favelas of Brazil as well: if the slums are so terrible, then why do people seem so eager to live there?)

Maybe that sort of large-scale engineering is necessary, though. The world that we inherited from Mumford’s generation is a world in which the cities and the suburbs work at cross purposes. The suburbs need the cities for the jobs and cultural amenities that are available there, while the suburbs and further-flung rural areas are where people from the city go when they want peace, quiet, and better schools. The structure of many American urban areas is a central city joined to the countryside by highways that drain all the city’s vitality. Merging an entire urban area so that everyone is rowing in the same direction makes a lot of sense.

It’s hard to think that far ahead when cities are fighting a rearguard action to correct for the mistakes of the past — mistakes that Mumford was already denouncing almost 60 years ago. Before I’d think about bringing the suburbs along with my plans, I’d want to correct a lot of things in actually-existing Boston: vastly improve the mass-transit system so that it befits a major American city; remove Storrow Drive or put it underground; do to the tangle of highways separating the South End from South Boston what we did to Interstate 93; do something to the Mass Pike gash through Boston (e.g., fill in all its air rights); remove the insane intersections that prevent the Emerald Necklace from being a completely walkable path through the city that we love. And that’s just the architecture, which is what Mumford focuses on. Then we’d have to talk about the schools.

There’s a lot to do and a lot of challenges. It’s unreasonable to expect that every word out of Mumford’s mouth would be directly applicable to the world we inhabit, but it’s shocking that so much of what he wrote foresaw the sad state we’re in today.

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity — October 13, 2015

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity

/stevereads/4 Comments

Image of a measuring table winding its way back and forth across the page, proceeding from the bottom of the page to the top in a zigzag

Let me itemize what I think I understand better about relativity now that I’ve read Bertrand Russell’s book:

  1. One goal of the theory of relativity is to express the laws of physics in ways that are less obviously tied to the position of the observer. In this way, the point is not to establish that “everything is relative”, but indeed to find a standpoint from which objective facts about the universe may be inferred.

  2. Measuring things in feet rather than meters is one of those obvious differences that shouldn’t matter at all in an objective theory of the world. We should be able to measure things in a “human-independent” way; our laws of physics should remain unchanged if the coordinates change. If we choose to express coordinates in polar form or rectangular form, who cares? If we choose to make the origin of the coordinate system the earth or make the origin Mars, that choice is obviously a fact about us, not a fact about nature. Devising a system of laws that removes these obviously human traits is what the tensor calculus is for.

  3. I think I understand what the Michelson-Morley experiment showed. If there really is such a thing as the æther, and if that æther has any mass, then we’d expect light to take longer to travel in certain directions than in others. I gather that the M-M experiment found no evidence that light travels at different speeds in different directions. Hence, if the æther does exist, it must have no mass … but now that I write it out, why is a massless æther a problem?

    (Forgive my spelling it ‘æther’; I just find that spelling so charmingly British.)

Here’s what I still don’t really get:

  1. I still don’t know what a tensor is, really. So I get the abstract outline of the idea of the problem we want to solve, and the name of the mathematical tool that solves it, but I don’t know the actual math.

  2. Russell makes clear — as every other popular exposition of relativity theory that I’ve read has made clear — that relativity theory didn’t have any data to support it for at least a few years. Russell emphasizes that relativity theory would still need to be confronted — as a logical argument, rather than as an empirical one — even if we had no data to support it. I don’t entirely understand the parts that “should have been obvious” even to Newtonian physicists. Certain points about reference frames make intuitive sense — e.g., that Bob dropping a ball while standing on a moving train will perceive the dropped ball differently than will Jim standing outside the train watching “Bob, train, and ball” as an ensemble; Jim will perceive a ball moving in an arc whose forward velocity matches that of the train, whereas Bob will perceive a ball with no forward velocity at all. Someone standing on Jupiter watching “Jim, Bob, train, ball, and earth” as an ensemble will see it altogether differently: now this larger ensemble is moving around the Sun at a certain velocity, moving away from or toward Jupiter, etc.

    …Is that all there is to it? That certain quantities can only logically be described in the context of a given reference frame?

  3. It’s a postulate of the system that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. I don’t really know why we’d assume that. Something-something Clerk Maxwell. Also, possibly, the M-M experiment?

  4. Russell tries, I gather, to construct a vocabulary for what now can be described objectively — i.e., for those concepts that survive even after we realize that much varies with the reference frame. He defines things called ‘events’ and ‘intervals’, but I don’t really understand what these are. The Wikipedia doesn’t clarify these concepts, at least for this reader.

  5. I understand, formally, the Lorentz contraction. It would appear that if I’m traveling the speed of light, and you’re observing me in relative motion, then you would see me as an object of length zero. As I say, I understand the equation formally, but I don’t understand why this should be so. Likewise, I understand the idea that if I’m in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light, and you’re back on earth, and we both carry clocks that were identical when we were both on earth, then my clock will show that infinitely much time has passed for every second that passes on yours — using the same Lorentz contraction, this time in the form of time dilation.

    If the principles of relativity theory should apply in a Newtonian world as well — if it’s a logical argument that Newton himself would have needed to confront even in a world without science-fiction spaceships — then how would time dilation and Lorentz contraction have affected the models that Newton himself advanced? Put another way: would Newton have dismissed all of this as irrelevant for objects traveling at terrestrial velocities? Or would he have seen the difficulties introduced by separate reference frames and reworked his entire conception of space and time?

  6. I understand that large objects in some sense distort the space around them. I understand, somewhat, the elegance of postulating that light travels in straight lines, and that it’s the space rather than the light that’s changing its path when it moves past a heavy object. But I don’t really understand what’s happening when space is distorted. In fact I don’t even know if “space is distorted” is a sensible way of expressing this.

  7. I understand that in some sense referring to “space and time” as four separate orthogonal axes is out of date, and that now one refers to “spacetime” as a single unified thing. In some sense I guess this means the dimensions are interdependent: where you are in space dictates where you are in time. But I don’t really understand this clearly.

It’s my own personal mode of comprehension that’s at fault here. Partly, I think Russell’s exposition would be a lot clearer if he allowed himself some mathematics. As it is, I think he’s in a partly-metaphorical / grudgingly-mathematical world, and to me it’s not a very clear world. (Similarly: Krugman tries in one of his books to explain power laws as elucidated by Herbert Simon, and to my eye Krugman only made the situation less confusing.)

I need to read more about relativity — more Wheeler, say, and less Hawking. (Real talk: has there ever been a more-discussed and less-understood book than Hawking’s?) More-mathematical relativity goes on the queue.