[Mass] Review: Winter Reading

I've read several books this winter break, and here are the recommendations:

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson - Absolute must-read if you care about tackling systematic racism. If you have a reading list regarding race in America, this needs to be at the top

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Banerjee, Abhijit V. - If you’re interested in knowing the science and studies behind why neoliberal/social democratic policies are the correct policies beyond your fuzzy twitter-fueled intuition, you should make time for this book

The Algebra of Happiness: Finding the Equation for a Life Well Lived by Scott Galloway- If you are a 20 something white man you will get something out of this book that may help you reprioritize things in life. If you are older than 30, or black, or not-a-man, you may get something out of this book but Galloway’s own history may come off hollow for you.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli - First science book I’ve read in a long time that A) is good and B) has the compelling conclusion that time is an illusion. If you read it and bought the conclusion, you would not be stupid for doing so.

Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright - There are, at this point, lots of books where white people explain that the core principles of Buddhism are true. This is one of them! What this book does is explain the core principles through the light of evolutionary psychology. I think it is obviously correct. If you disagree with “obvious” you should give this book a shot

Review: A Promised Land

I've had a quote from Obama on my Facebook profile for about four years. I’ve even quoted it at team building discussions at work when asked what’s my motto or mantra:

“I don’t believe in apocalyptic until the apocalypse comes.”

He said it as a response to the election of President Trump. Four years later, after the election of Trump, and almost exactly one year into an actual apocalypse, the quote still rings in my ears as I read this massive first volume of his memoirs. Did Obama have faith in the ever-delayed apocalypse because he was the one doing the delaying? Did he know that the wards he put on the nation would be the first and primary target of his predecessor? Who knows? We’ll find out in volume two.

Volume One covers Obama’s life between his time at Columbia (the source of memes in his quest to get laid) and the waning years of his first term. He gets the motivation out of the way fairly quickly: after a “late” blooming, Obama found that his calling in life was to try to help people. Getting into politics was the necessary condition of that calling.

The major two sections of this book are then in two pieces. First is the Ascent, as Obama goes from state senator to President in less than a decade. Second is the Turmoil, as Obama handles crisis after crisis set off by Moloch and President Bush. These sections are intensely entertaining and incredibly page turning.

During the Ascent, Obama has to negotiate his rise in Chicago and come to grips with the hard realities of compromise-based governing. State and local politics are games. They’re business. His ideals are dashed and thrown. He chases them upwards. When he gets to the next level, he finds the same thing, but this time he has a national audience. Obama at this point has figured out that he has pure, raw charisma- the type of charisma you find in an asteroid of pure gold. Yet, the Senate is as hard to create impact as the Illinois senate. His ideals are dashed and thrown. He chases them upwards.

He becomes President.

The Turmoil itself spans my time in high school. Everything he describes I remember having a perspective, but they don’t feel like my memories… I was a Republican back then! Yet, reading Obama explain crisis after crisis stirs those memories. The economy was falling into utter collapse. The ACA was being fought over and compromised on. Our imperialist wars dragged on. Obama goes over each of these, explains what happens, describes where he was with Sasha or Malia when Ax said something funny. Each chapter goes by like an episode…

… because they _are_ episodes. Because this entire goddamned book is a Sorkian drama, a treatment for a new series of the West Wing.

The pilot starts out simple enough: it starts with the end of Obama’s presidency. It’s an hour long affair on HBO Max. The last shot is the President writing in his notebook, “What the hell happened.”

The first season tells the story of his rise from the announcement to V-day. It tells the stories of his other elections with an assortment of flashbacks. The dialog is crisp. It’s more like Veep at this point, but less harsh. The story is hope, with the demon of realpolitick always in the dark, close by.

The second season is maybe 15 episodes. It goes methodically policy by policy, crisis by crisis, sometimes interweaving arcs together. The main cast- the Obamas, Axelrod, Rahm- all have perfect lookalikes. We throw in a few other characters who are made up interns that explain what Obama wants to explain to the audience in this book, “Politics is really fucking hard and comprimise has to be made to push progress even an inch.” The interns or staffers or whatever also fuck. It’s HBO Max after all.

Of course, the second to last episode is the megaloss of the midterms. The last episode is the death of Bin Laden.

This TV show might even have Key and Peele show up. We might reimagine Obama’s Anger Translator as a historical fact. One of the most repeated phrases in the book is “What I wanted to say was…” as the President grapples with the fact that his speeches and thoughts were constricted by political expediency. When pushed about the culpability of the Deep Horizon Oil spill, for example, he claims to basically have wanted to say, “Fuck y’all for using so much goddamned oil.”

The book is entertaining, and it is a useful reminder to the centre-left of how we got to now (the apocalypse). We are coming 12 years off of the deepest recession in a century, still in the middle of the longest wars our country has ever fought, and the safeguards against disease and disaster that Obama set out to create almost 12 years ago have been broken. We have to fix these problems with a broken government- a government that is broken in part because of a fiercely racist response _to_ Obama. That’s okay though! Because, yes, we can do it! The apocalypse hasn’t come yet.

Review: How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveller

“Baba yetu, yetu uliye
Mbinguni yetu, yetu, amina
Baba yetu, yetu, uliye
Jina lako litukuzwe”

This book is fun as hell, but also incredibly eerie: You are a time traveler stuck in the past, and you must try to survive and rebuild all of Civilization. That’s the conceit and it’s a good one- the basis of a really enjoyable Ask Reddit thread. It gave Ryan North the chance to learn more than he needs to know about obscure technological feats and it gives us the chance to learn about humanity’s technological development over time up until a little bit after the Second Industrial Revolution.

The problem? In a book full of footnotes and callouts, there are two callouts that North returns to again and again and again: this invention was discovered by accident, and to truly perfect it you need to enlist hundreds or thousands of people to do it.

The first problem is not unheard of to anybody who reads a lot of technological history: humans spent hundreds of years bumbling around with technology. Thine Chinese had gunpowder, the printing press, and strong bureaucracies centuries before the Europeans knew the world wasn’t flat (I’m joking but also...). Technologies for math, language, and measurement- which don’t require any major supplemental technologies other than “Time to sit down and think hard” took millenniums of building up on each other.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, but the giants the giants stand are so shrouded in rainy mist and opaque fog that we forget that a thousand generations live inside us now.*

A bigger problem arises for the stranded time traveler that will almost certainly doom them to subsistence: there are not enough people. Every time North describes the essence and functioning of a new technology, he notes, “You should probably have somebody doing this full time.” He even brings up early on that you need a caloric surplus in order to allow people to specialize, but I think this hides the point: alone, you will die.

If you’re blessed to live in a modern capitalistic country, everything around you was mostly made by the complex machinations of the incentives of millions of people. And I don’t mean, “a few thousand people sitting in board rooms designing things”, I mean a few dozen millions of people at minimum.

The conceit of a time traveler building a civilization is an exploration of minimum autarky. What is the minimum number of people you need to produce the maximum number of things [you need to live an ok life]?

The answer is startling high. Put a human being back before the birth of other humans, and you will have an experience very much like in The Martian: that human will die long before he would in an otherwise human-populated world. Alone, we are all Mark Watney: barely enlightened apes who die on Earth just a little bit slower than we might die on Mars.

But together? The smallest most industrially advanced country is probably South Korea, and it has about 50 million people. I feel reasonable saying, “If everybody stopped trading with South Korea, they would be able to maintain an industrial civilization with computers, food, and energy” (but they would be significantly poorer). But that is 50 million people. 50 million.

We know for a fact that isolated countries- North Korea (25MM), Iran (70MM), Cuba (11MM)- do not do well. These countries in general have the things you would expect for economic strength- resources, large land areas, etc- but they lack a connection to the broader human noosphere and economy that each and every one of us in developed countries plug into thoughtlessly everyday.

The lessons of “How to Invent Everything” is you fucking don’t. You are a single cell playing a part in a vast temporal, spatial eusocial organism. Every part of your mind has been impacted by the discoveries and profound, accidental realizations of barely literate chimps. Every day you rely on not just your family, not just your community, but on an entire planet of those same barely literate chimps.

How do you invent everything? With other people.

Other people:

“The people are the heroes now
Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow
When we look up, the fields are white
The fields are white!
With harvest in the morning light
And mountain ranges one by one
Rise red beneath the harvest moon”

Review: One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger

America is good. Americans are good. We should try to add 600 million of them in the next 80 years.

That’s the challenge MattY gives us. His “Why” can be broken down into two reasons: The first is to combat the rise of China and hedge on India. Disregard that one. It’s to get China-hawks (Republicans?) on his side. The second one is more subtle and more seductive but also blatantly obvious and true and philosophically endearing: people are good and we should want more of them. We should want more of them to be American, simply because they’d be happier as Americans- because they want to be Americans.

This is probably the most controversial point -the “why” of it all- because once you get down to the brass tacks of how to actually do it, anybody who reads this will probably agree with any random policy that MattY recommends. The more people you have, the more differentiation you have, the more options you have, the more joy you can collectively and personally have. Having more people to interact with is like having a camera with a higher resolution. Sharp lines and beautiful colors and wonderful shades make a tighter and more powerful image.

People are beautiful.

We need 600 million beautiful people. That requires an annual growth rate of 1.52%. That’s almost triple what it is now. America gets about 1 million immigrants a year. We have 4 million births a year and about 3 million deaths a year, for a net gain of 1 million lives. In other words, America’s population grows yearly at a paltry 2 million people a year, roughly split by domestic births and immigrants.

MattY’s plan is set around these two wheels. He shows us in the General Social Survey that American women claim to want to have 2.5 children. The actual number is 1.77. In other words, there are 2 million missing babies that women WANT to have but are unable to. The reason is simple: kids are too damn expensive. The answer to this is a bunch of policies that alleviate the strain on American families: reduced college tuition, universal childcare and preschool, child allowances, and required maternal *and* paternal parental leave. On the Left, none of these are particularly outrageous, but there are questions of fairness about them on the Right. The answer should be clear though- these are pro-family, pro-life policies. Contrary to popular conservative opinion, the government did not squash The Family in the 60s and 70s, but rather let corporate American subvert it.

So, we found an additional 2 million children a year simply by changing policy to allow American families to do what they already want to do.

We only need an additional 1 million people to get to our goals. How do we do that? Well, immigration. Where do we find all those immigrants? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. More than 750 million people want to come to the United States. We can afford to be choosy in who we let in like those in the most need, like refugees, and those with the most to offer, like foreign scientists, athletes and artists. We can literally take top 1% and we can do this year after year till the end of the century.

And, because of our current President, we are choosing not to. We’re in fact choosing to cut down the little that we’re letting in now.

I hope these numbers are useful for approaching 1 Billion Americans, because there is a lot I haven’t touched. MattY goes into a bunch of the things that you might bring up- traffic congestion, not enough water resources, or homes and then he counters with an obvious policy used in other countries that can be applied here. He shows not only is this something that America should do, but that it is imminently possible and that it will increase rather than decrease our standard of living.

Let’s do it.

Review: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

When you read the Bottom Billion, something seems off. The plight of the poor in the developing world is known to all who read about it just a little bit. There is rampant starvation, intranational and international conflict. Africa is full of terrorists waiting to fly to Mexico and walk across the American border. Christian missionaries, setting flight to go … build schools…?... lead the battle cry, “We gotta help them”.

Paul Collier’s 2007 book, “The Bottom Billion” attempts to be a guide to helping them. Since it’s publishing, something must have. The World Bank reports the extreme poverty rate has dropped from 18% (2008) to 10% (2015). That’s a 44% reduction in just 7 years. Further, the World Bank data tells us that the intensity of poverty has decreased.

If you had a magic money printer (or a tech start up) in 2008, it would have cost ~$250 billion a year to bring everybody under the poverty line up to the poverty line. In 2013, it was only $160 billion.

“Money isn’t everything, Aaron” I hear you say. Correct, that’s fair. In 2007, almost 36 countries had life expectancies below 60 years, but in 2019 that number was 5. The number of countries with women having more than five children- a sign of not being able to control one’s family size, and hence women’s rights- has dropped from 35 to 13.

The gist of the Bottom Billion is that there are a billion people in numerous countries- most in Africa, with a few in central Asia and one or two in South America- that face extreme poverty that is so intense that they may be trapped there effectively forever. Paul Collier describes a horror world where 7 billion people in relative affluence live aside 1 billion people in extreme poverty (who also generate terrorists). And yet, when I comb over the data I can’t find a “trapped” population. Indeed, the countries that are in the most dire straits in 2020 -Syria, Venezuela, Oman, Libya- would not be considered in the bottom billion almost 14 years ago. Subsaharan Africa’s economy in 2017 was 14% higher than it was in 2007. That isn’t as brilliantly fast as Asia, but it isn’t slouching and is made of several countries, like Ethiopia (population: 100 million), where the GDP per capita has doubled.

Paul identified four traps that were supposed to make these countries stay poor. These are Conflict, Landlockedness, the natural resource trap, and being tiny. Of these, when I look at a map of countries by economic success in the last decade, I mostly see “Did they have a war or something like a civil war?” Indeed, the Great Lakes region of Africa is pushing forward even in the countries that are landlocked. Are the other traps a component in slowing down economic growth? The natural resource trap definitely seems to compete with manufacturing in Africa, but who is having massive growth on the world stage seems to be dominated by proximity to China more than anything else.

The Bottom Billion list, as Collier identifies, has GDP per capitas about 30% higher on average in 2017 compared to 2007.

The four solutions described to help assist are directed aid, military intervention, international charters that encourage good governance, and trade policy. As far as I am aware, the latter hasn’t occurred in Western countries, and the military intervention that has happened was either an abject failure (Libya, Syria) or highly questionable (French troops sexually assaulting host country nationals). It does seem, however, that international charters have been functional. The African Union, which Collier does point to as an area of interest, has likely decreased the amount of military unrest throughout Africa, and the East African Community is likely the fastest growing economic region outside of Asia and Ethiopia. Setting international norms and tying them to incentives works.

Of course, given how tiny and technical some of the four solutions can specifically drill down to, I may not know that they’ve been implemented at all!

The book itself is well-written, the logical steps it takes you on seem valid, and the studies that make each trap seem reasonably backed by data, but the decade since it was published make it seem a bit quaint. References to terrorism and a quietness about China’s rise make it seem like a product of its time. Indeed, China is treated as a competitor to low wage labor, not the country beginning to suck up every raw material atom on the planet.

Anybody who still sees Africa or Central Asia or any historically poor region as still poor, or trapped in poverty, simply hasn’t looked at the data. They may be last in line, but unless they’re at war with themselves, they’re not stuck there.

Review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

This is one of those books that I read and I immediately wish somebody had been more forceful about recommending to me. I knew I needed to read this book for a long time, and I understood it would be useful and I respected Haidt a lot before I began reading it.

But I didn’t realize how powerful it would be.

Haidt is after the foundations of morality, not as we wish they were, but as they actually are. I remember when I was evangelical in high school, staying up late into the night trying to derive a pro-life, libertarian, gay-excluding-but-not-hating moral logic from first principles. I wrote in a blue pen in a lined notebook with a blue cover and called it my Blue Book. I was trying to find the foundations of morality that I wanted.

The first thing Haidt points out -and something I think now is mostly common knowledge- is that this is obviously backwards. I had written down the answer to my moral philosophy at the bottom of the page, and was working from the top trying to prove the point. The Blue Book was not a mathematical text- it was the workings of an invested lawyer, who was getting paid to make an answer up.

Where is the answer coming from then? Haidt points to subconscious, fast-acting and a preceding intuition. When faced with a moral dilemma, our gut knows our answer and our mouth makes whatever excuse is necessary.

What informs the guts though? This was the revolutionary part for me, and one that makes total sense: a set of dynamic social psychological processes evolved to make living together bearable. Humans have what most other animals do not have: we have a theory of mind. This is good because it helps us predict what other humans will do, and then we can garner what the intent of others is, and then we help or hurt that intent. Those that help each other do better, and from the increasingly large group dynamics do the components of morality pour out:

1) Care/Harm, 2) Liberty, 3) Authority, 4) Loyalty, 5) Fairness and 6) Purity.

From a generalized need to care and get care for one’s children, comes the care/harm principle. From the need to keep tribes pseudo-egalitarian (almost all hunter-gatherer tribes are egalitarian to some degree), comes the liberty principle. From the need to counteract and align the liberty principle, comes the authority principle. From the need to punish traitors and keep the tribe intact, comes the loyalty principle. From the need to get rid of lazy free-riders, comes the fairness principle. From the need to get rid of disease, comes the purity principle.

These six principles make up a “moral taste” system, where missing any one specific set of values could wreck the entire system. This finally answered the question I have long, long questioned-- what’s the deal with everyone hating on the society described in Brave New World? A society of consumerist drug addicts seems pretty fun, to be honest. The problem is that it completely fails the Liberty principle. We are designed to despise bullies, and a system that controls us at every level is the ultimate bully.

Finally, Haidt points this moral tastes system at the United States, and finds that an interesting problem occurs: progressives tend to care about the liberty and care/harm principles while conservatives care about the remaining six equally. The problem: liberals become unable to model, or even speak to, conservatives. Conservatives, however, are able to easily model liberals.

I asked a question on an Instagram poll while reading the beginning of this book- Haidt poses a problem: is it immoral for a woman to use an old American flag as a bathroom rag in the privacy of her own home? My Instagram followers are mostly all progressive leftists, so only four people answered in the affirmative; most people said it was fine. I can think of why their answers might be true really quickly, “It doesn’t hurt anybody, so it isn’t bad” is the overwhelming response, but a few of them I imagine feeling, if not thinking, “Fuck the [American] Flag”.

For my friends who voted in the affirmative, I had no idea what they would say. Maybe something about the flag being sacred? I am literally at a loss.

And that is a problem.

In 47 days, possibly the most important election of our lifetime is happening, and it requires a hefty majority of Americans to vote for Vice-President Biden, and that hefty majority will rely on many people who previously voted Red (either a little or a lot). Liberals can talk about how President Trump is causing massive harm to people and stamping on their freedoms, but a full moral palette requires more than just ACAB (liberty principle) and SaveTheChildren (care principle).

We need to appeal to the other principles:

Donald Trump is eroding and purposefully damaging the trust that Americans have in our institutions and our authorities. Americans need to trust the police and justice system, and Donald Trump has destroyed it.

Donald Trump has put his own holdings above the American people, having foreign powers pour money into his hotels and estate, while America has faced the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. He is loyal only to himself; he has betrayed the American people.

Donald Trump has poisoned Americans. He has let our air get poisoned, he has let our water get poisoned, and he has poisoned our national discourse. Of course, he also knowingly downplayed the worst pandemic to appear on Earth in 100 years.

I think most issues can be described in terms of all five moral principles. Covid, for example, is obviously a breach of the purity principle, but it also destroyed the authority of the CDC and the FDA, while Trump betrayed American workers. I could go on.

We need to learn how to speak in multiple moral languages, and to understand that people approach the world with different personalities, with different settings to moral interactions, and that that is a very good thing! We just need to be able to navigate it.

Review: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

I work in data. It is my job to understand how to look at a few hundred columns and a few million rows and write a compelling story. If I misunderstand the data, or if I tell an incorrect story, then my chances of getting fired or passed up for promotion increases. It's therefore in my best, best interest to understand data bias and fight against it.

But, oh boy, the world is so goddamned biased. The world is so goddamned sexist.

Caroline Perez lays out in a little more than 300 pages an entire catalog of sexist malpractice. It is honestly at times overwhelming. Sometimes the text reads like Perez is dumping her extremely well-organized OneNote or Evernote folders on us, where each note is the tale of a male-dominated, male-oriented system believing itself to be acting as an impartial decider. Spoiler alert: none of them are.

The biggest culprit -the problem of invisible women- is a lack of data. A related phenomenon would be “color blindness”. “I don’t see color” is usually what a naive racist person says when confronted with some facts about our racist society. “I don’t see sex/gender” is said by, well, nobody, but a lot of naive sexists are thinking it. We’ve allowed ourselves to build giant systems that essentially act that way. These “sex blind systems” -transportation, technology, medicine, etc- are holdovers from historical patriarchy. How do they continue to perpetuate themselves?

Perez describes two main ways they do this from what I can tell: aggregated or missing data, and missing women stakeholders. The entire world is designed- whether it be different products or systems- by decision-makers who are informed by the data that they have available. If the data doesn’t show different segmentations- in this case, sex or gender- then it can have no impact on the final outcome, no matter who is in charge. Given that it is men who are often in charge, this missing data is not considered.

The first problem -fucked up data- should be our first line of defense. It’s technical, and kind of breaks down into a few problems, which have their own solutions. The first is something most data-adjacent careers run into GIGO. Garbage-in, garbage-out. The trick here is that most of the garbage is male. We see this in trained AI systems, especially in speech or image recognition systems. Most of the labeled examples are male, which means the trained AI will do better with males (let’s be honest, with white or Asian males) then it will with females. Here the solution is pretty clear, but given the dearth of women engineers may be missed: add more women to the training data.

A related problem is that, even if the data exists in 50-50 spreads, it might not be labeled. If it isn’t labeled, then the model won’t be able to take it into account the differences between men and women’s behaviors. You can imagine looking at a network diagram of, say, bus passengers. Thick grey lines are the most used routes, thin grey lines are the least used. If you’re trying to prune the graph -i.e cut service for the less used lines- then you would just snip the thinnest edges. But color each route by the gender of its users, and you can easily find yourself cutting off edges that hurt women indiscriminately. The example Perez has is that women are more likely to move around the edges of a city rather than in-and-out of the city center.

Negative intent isn’t necessary- just shitty, unlabeled data.

A third type of problem is the “flaw of averages”*. A useful, non-sexed example from my external reading is when the U.S air force was designing cockpits for the jet age. They designed them based on taking the average of 4000 pilots and found that building the most perfectly average cockpit wasn’t a great cockpit at all. In fact, it was perfectly designed for nobody at all. Different traits -even just among white men- are correlated and anticorrelated in a vast array of ways, meaning the average represents absolutely no one.

Now imagine if you do apply this same problem, but include an entire population with their own vast array of correlations and anticorrelations. It just gets worse.

A final problem, and one that is truly invisible, is simply missing data. Data on women, in many cases, is simply not collected. These are known unknowns, but often unknown unknowns. A lot of the time these are economic data that we’re missing, but often we’re ignoring them. Women do kincare and unpaid labor at higher rates than men worldwide, but Perez points to ways that it simply does not make its way into the policy decision-making process.

These problems- GIGO, unlabeled data, missing data, and the flaw of averages- are not exhaustive or exclusive categories. In fact, they’re not even sexist problems in and of themselves, but they happen in sexist ways because there is nobody to catch them.

Perez points to two ways that women are failed to be consulted. The first is obvious- they’re simply not in the design and decision-making spaces. Parliaments, parties, and local governance boards are skewed male. Board rooms (and therefore the promotional ladders they control) are skewed male. I don’t need to go deeply into this- you’re reading this review, you know how the world works.

The second is more insidious because it can be made by people who are actively pursuing women’s best interests: not getting women’s feedback. As a person interested in development, it’s pretty terrifying to watch how interventions in the third world simply fail or even backfire because women were not asked (or were asked in the presence of the local male authority) how an intervention would actually work for them in practice. Without actively seeking women’s input as customers, we fail to meet their needs.

All of these failures lead up to women being put at higher risk of discomfort, danger, or even death. And, again to stress the point, you do not even need to be an actively sexist, pro-trad MRA for these failures to occur. Like with racism and anti-racism, if you’re not actively attempting to be anti-sexist, these errors can and will perpetuate sexism.

This book is fantastic and brings as much of the data around sexism to light as it can in as many areas as possible. Definitely read it, definitely recommend it.

Review: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

At times, Fagan’s writing is annoying and seems like it was vying for a PBS Nova Documentary that it would never get. Most of the time, it is terrifying:

The Medieval Warm Period was a period where Europe was warmer, but most of the rest of the world was drier, and therefore more prone to drought, and therefore more deadly. We are rapidly approaching that world.

Fagan’s book is a section of world history, a kind of hypercut that Tim Urban calls “horizontal history”. We get to see every continent, a wide range of different societies, all at the same time period. The thing that connects them all is that the sky is changing, and often changing too slowly for them to notice until it's too late.

The thread that connects every society affected by the Warm Period isn’t warming itself- some societies did not find their geography warming at all. No, the thread is Water. The overabundance or lack of water, combined with regional climatic unpredictability, is what caused multiple societies to collapse. The Mayans, California Indigenous peoples, and multiple African peoples fell to endemic drought. South China and the Khmer Empire fell to devastating climatological switchbacks as droughts gave way to torrential flooding. Fagan’s list goes on.

12 years after the publication of the Great Warming, we’re seeing the droughts of climate change that humanity already faced 1000 years ago rear their heads. Droughts clamp down on water in developing countries, and cities like Cape Town and Chennai have stunning reductions in their local water sources. We see floods threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people in China. The once-in-a-millennium droughts and floods come on a regular basis. Countries fight wars over food.

The Greater Warming marches on.

Review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Why are some countries poor? If your answer is "Because the gubbermint is keepin' the poor man down" then you might be wrong. If your answer is "Because genocidal, white, European colonial powers established neoimperial lines of control" then you might be wrong. If your answer is malaria, or poverty traps, or history of political and economic institutions... you might be right, but that might not be the whole picture.

"Why are some countries poor?" is probably best answered by questioning those living in poor countries and doing some experiments with them! You can't navel gaze your way to the moon, so you're sure as hell not going to navel gaze your way to ending global poverty.

Poor Economics asks us to approach the problem of global poverty from a realist perspective, as well. You're not going to solve global warming by building a giant solar shade in earth orbit, so why do people think that you can solve global poverty by throwing a couple of trillion dollars around? Instead, just like how with global warming you try three dozen different solutions, you must try and experiment with three dozen different institutions across the global South.

The basic framework to Poor Economics' experiments is this: Being poor is caused by not having money. Not having money is caused by lacking jobs, capital, or savings. Convincing people to get jobs, or teach their kids how to read, or to save money instead of spending it on booze is not as obvious as you would expect. Interventions have no effects at all or even backfire effects, and whatever your ideological flavor is probably won't help you predict what those effects are. Instead, you have to experiment with randomized control trials and systematic measurement.

To put it in another way,

poverty problem --> Intervention --> Randomized Control Trial --> 0.05% of poverty alleviated

This answer is obviously immensely unsatisfying. It has no buggy man. There are no demons for us to hunt and burn. We can't hoist Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk by their asses and beat them with sticks for not putting money into countries with astronomical economic event horizons. We can't blame the commies, either, at least not completely.

Instead, we have to do the work. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show us how. After all, that's why they won the Nobel Prize.

Review: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

It is incredibly hard to read history without thinking, “The British Empire was the worst political organization in the history of the planet.” And yet, Why Nations Fail, at least partially, absolves the British Empire of leaving their former colonies politically broken and destitute. It turns out that the natural equilibrium state of humans in a state is politically broken and destitute.

The British didn’t enact regimes of tyranny over democracies abroad- they simply replaced local rulers with their own officers, and instead of directing the local resources to a few local elites, directed them towards the home isles. This pattern happened in other European empires, dating all the way back to Spain’s conquest of Central and South America. This pattern happened in the gunpowder Empires. This pattern happened in the Asian empires, the African empires, the American empires, and all the tiny states trying to be powers throughout all of history:

The British Empire was the worst political organization in the history of the planet, because it was the culmination of _extractive_ political organizations.

I bring up the British Empire because people like to point at the British Empire and blame it for post-colonial troubles, and others like to point at it for post-colonial good fortune, but what Acemoglu and Robinson make clear is that rulers may come and go, but _instutitions_ guide the progress of peoples.

Their story goes like this: There are extractive political institutions- states and leaders that collect rents from other people- and there are extractive economic institutions- the ability to steal land from subordinates or slavery or monpoly over a rare good. These two institutions are mutually reinforcing- the political institutions use force to protect the extractive economic institutions, and the economic institutions pay off the political ones.

These institutions are the answer to “Why Nations Fail”: there is a status quo bias. Political and economic leaders in extractive states _don’t want to succeed_, because if they do they will lose out on their political and economic power. When they do attempt to succeed, it’s mostly an effort to continue their own survival.

The opposite types of institutions- inclusive institutions- tend to bring about the opposite effect, and they too are self-reinforcing. An inclusive political institution is pluralist, with power located at multiple competing nexuses and flowing to new centers of power as they form. An inclusive economic institution is diversified across different types of capital, and fortified by stable property rights. The incentives in this system are against the status quo- and directed towards profit and growth.

The physics of why nations fail can be boiled down to this: is a historic event distributing power more broadly, or centralizing it in the hands of some clique.

The history of nations failing (or not failing) is a lot more fascinating! Acemoglu and Robinson walk us through case study after case study, from the history of Latin America to Japan to various African countries. They tell of the internal dynamics of Argentina causing it to plummet from First World to Second World and the complicated but romantic history of Botswana as it moved from Third World to Second World against all odds. The historical snapshots in this book are enough to recommend it.

Yet, the physics of the book seem quite simplistic, because they are. 1) Acemoglu and Robinson only talk about “growth” as if it were the adoption of technology, not the _creation_ and invention of technology. 2) They only interact with the history of post-plague states, and their theory has nothing to say about Bronze Age states or earlier (is a hunter-gather society inclusive?). 3) Inclusive states have existed every once in a while historically, yet not produced the same economic explosion as England’s industrial revolution, why is that? 4) Other explanations from the Great Divide seem coherent, and yet Acemoglu and Robinson throw them aside. “It’s only the institutions” they say on every page, yet The Origins of Political Order by Fukuyama breaks down institutions into more constituent parts, and those parts definitely _add_ explanatory value.

One of the things that get me is that the dynamics Acemoglu and Robinson describe are of two separate equilibriums, two self-reinforcing cycles, but they don’t mention the natural factors that push a society from one to the other unless it’s good for their story, but those natural factors entirely rely on the factors that they denigrate. “Geography has nothing to do with development” doesn’t mean much if geography makes it a lot easier to be inclusive (Greek city-states) or extractive (Deep South America).

Institutions obviously have a powerful role in the development of societies, and they may even be dominant, but they themselves are contingent on natural, geographic, climactic, cultural, and technological factors.

What actionable advice can we take from this theory? The propagation of inclusive economic institutions is the main key: private property rights, IP rights, equitable law enforcement, the rights of labor, and the restrictions of gross centralization of economic power are all ways that political interests become diffuse and pluralistic while also centralized and incentivized to be engines of growth.

In other words, we have to vote for Biden.

Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Who knew that a guidebook for Cities:Skylines could be a powerful academic text that condemns the use of government power to destroy organically grown neighborhoods and communities?

Jacobs' book is almost 60 years old. It was written at the height of post-war suburban sprawl and at the beginning of the death of the American city.

Confession: When discussing this book on dates, I called it "Great Life and Death of American Cities" and "Life and Death of Great American Cities". I remember the unamused look of a girl saying, "Yes, Jane Jacobs" and only realized weeks afterwards that it was because I completely butchered the title. "What, babe, you haven't read the Stone of Philosophers and Harry Potter"?

Death comes first because the cities died. 10 years after Jane Jacobs published her book, property crimes doubled. White flight was at its maximum. Hollywood filled theaters with scenes of skeevy ally streets. My home, Washington, D.C, lost 25% of its district population decade after decade.

And then Life: a reversal, a growing, a resurgence of American cities that, as she warned, threatens to wipe them out. Everywhere one looks, the walkable, diverse American city grows in splendor as the suburban villages of yesterday wither. What makes the new American city Jacobsian? Economic diversity, dense walkable areas, and cross-use that mixes the new and old. What threatens the new American city? Rising prices kill profit margins kill economic diversity until the only things left are apartments for artless tech bros, tech companies, and the restaurants willing to deliver Ubereats.

There is a certain sense of pragmatic radicalism that comes through. "Let's build utopia!" is answered with a "Let's uhhh, not". This is lower-case c conservatism. The conservatism of _ecology_. Jacob's rightly sees The City in terms of a complex web of interdependent systems, like a rainforest or an industrial economy. "If it didn't work for the USSR, why do you think it would work for the Department of Urban Planning?" is something you almost expect to see on the page (except, of course, that the book was written 30 years before the fall of the USSR).

Reading this book, you feel like you are reading a piece of literature thrown into the past, like a time traveler writing a letter to the present, "This is what it will be like."