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.