Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

Turchin’s End Times

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I got through Peter Turchin’s book End Times. It is definitely an interesting book. To summarize, organized human societies tend to develop a “wealth pump” whereby the wealthy and powerful influence the rules of the game to appropriate an ever larger share of a society’s wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is not just the median or what we think of as the “middle class”, it is the bottom 90% of the wealth and income distribution. He shows hard evidence that the policies enacted in the U.S. represent the preferences of the top 10%. Not only are the preferences of the median citizen under-represented, they have NO statistical bearing on what is actually enacted. This situation tends to eventually reach a point of instability unless intentional and effective steps are taken to “shut down the wealth pump”, which happens occasionally. Instability can sometimes look like outright collapse into chaos, but it can also look like fracturing or breakup of a society into smaller entities, as happened with the “fall” of the Roman empire.

What makes the book a little different than other “cyclical theories of history” is first that he backs it up with statistical evidence gathered from many societies over a long period of time. Second, it is not the “immiseration” of the common people that leads to instability, but actually the growth of the “elites” due to the wealth pump. At some point, there are more elites that want to be in power than available positions of power. They fight amongst themselves, and their rhetoric may allow them to gain a following among the masses, but their preferences and interests still represent the rich and powerful class of which they are a part, and switching from one elite faction to another will not shut down the wealth pump.

Top Urban Planning Books of 2022

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Planetizen has a list of top urban planning (and related fields) books from 2022, or to be more accurate, fall 2021 through fall 2022. Lots of fields are related to urban planning, like engineering, architecture, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, ecology, economics, and public health to name just a handful.

First, they have an interesting list that they call “The Canon”:

  • To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebenezer Howard
  • The Death and the [sic] Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [yes, they got the title wrong – ouch!]
  • Design With Nature by Ian McHarg
  • The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
  • The Urban General Plan, by T.J. Kent, Jr.
  • Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practices, edited by Gary Hack et al.

Anyway, here are a few from the new list that caught my eye:

I have reached middle age as defined by having a reading list of more books than I can read in my remaining lifespan (a long list for what I hope will still be a long life). So I am not sure how many of these I will get too. But knowing they are out there is useful in case I need to brush up on a particular topic at some point.

5 of Bill Gates’s Favorite Books

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I guess this qualifies as my first “best of” post for 2022. It’s a bit weak though. Bill Gates, instead of picking his five favorite books that came out during the year, picked five books that he recommended to somebody during the year. He picked Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the “best introduction to grownup sci-fi”, which I take to mean sci-fi books for people who don’t have enough imagine to consider reading sci-fi, but might enjoy it if they try. This is not one of my favorite sci-fi books. About all I remember is a swimming pool supposedly somewhere in the Poconos, and the audiobook reader inexplicably giving a key character supposedly from the Poconos and southern accent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an okay book, but even if I were restricting myself to Heinlein I might pick something else, like Starship Troopers, which some “serious” people have at least heard of (and to be fair, Billy G. mentions in his post). How about Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, which depicts a plausible near-future and is extremely entertaining and mind-blowing.

The only other book I’ll mention is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, which might be interesting. Still, this list don’t impress me much. I’m thinking old Billy Gates just didn’t do a lot of reading this year. Can’t he pay people to give him the Cliff’s Notes? (Considering he has more money than any particular gods, couldn’t he track down Cliff himself? Well, I looked this up and Cliff was Clifton K. Hillegass, and he died in 2001.)

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

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I think I made a post on this based on a review of the book awhile ago, but now I have read the actual book. My verdict: It was okay, but did not live up to the promise of its fantastic title. It stitches together a lot of disparate ideas and headlines to try to come up with a coherent big picture, and doesn’t quite succeed in my opinion.

Basically, the book forecasts a coming era of extreme supply made possible by a number of technologies. First, solar energy making energy abundant and cheap. Second, asteroid mining making materials abundant and cheap. Third, biotechnology making health care and food abundant and cheap.

“Fully automated” means there won’t be a ton a work to go around for humans. And this won’t matter if the abundant energy, materials, health care and food are spread around because there will be plenty for everyone.

“Luxury” means the supply will be so high that prices will be low or even tend toward zero.

Where “communism” comes in is that with supply so high and prices tending toward zero, the rich and powerful will try to ration and control the supply of goods and services to the rest of us so they can charge for them and get rich. So join me, comrades, as we the people must own the means of production in order to keep this from happening. Also, something about local business and worker cooperatives but I didn’t find this convincing.

A few things bother me. The first is the idea of “layers of limits”. Let’s say technology allows us to solve a lot of our current problems. Bringing in, say, ten times more materials from off planet may create a waste problem unless we can get the idea of a truly circular economy (i.e., 100% recycling of materials) going.

Second, this argument seems to foresee a sort of end of technological history. The government may fund a lot of basic research, but market discipline is what drives a lot of applied science and technological research from there. The government many things but it is not disciplined. If all our needs and wants are met, there will be no markets driving further progress. But history suggests that capitalism will always convince us to want more, and to consider yesterday’s wants to be tomorrow’s needs. This seems to be human nature, so unless artificial intelligence is taking over technological progress and pursuing it for the sheer joy of puzzle solving, it seems to me there will still be a role for a private sector.

Bloodlands

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was on my list for awhile, and I suppose I finally decided to read it because of the war in Ukraine. This is a good book and a horrible book, in the sense that it is a well-researched, well-written account of probably the worst series of events in world history. It is first and foremost a book about the Holocaust. It is also a delightful romp through the famine Stalin intentionally imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s, Stalin’s internal terror unleased on his own citizens in the late 1930s, Nazi mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the siege of Leningrad, and the forced relocation of people (including Germans remaining in newly Soviet-occupied areas) at the end of the war that resulted in additional deaths.

I certainly don’t have much to add to scholarly discourse on the Holocaust. I have read more than one account and feel that I have a grasp of the facts, which is a very different thing than wrapping my head around the events, which I am not sure anyone can do. I think everyone needs to have a grasp of the facts, grapple with them, and then not think about them all the time. One thing that surprised me is Snyder’s explanation of how the complete picture really became available only after the end of the Cold War. This is because many of the worst atrocities happened in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war, and western (i.e. outside the Communist countries) scholars after the war tended to focus on the evidence and accounts available to them of Jews and others in Western Europe. These people suffered horrible atrocities, but the atrocities further east were of another magnitude in terms of both body count and utter depravity. The Soviets did not exactly deny the Holocaust, but for propaganda reasons they tended to downplay the mass murder of Jews and portray events as atrocities committed by Germans against Soviet civilians, sometimes glossing over the fact that people in these areas came under Soviet control only late in the war, and in some cases were also subjected to Soviet atrocities.

Something I was not aware of was Stalin’s antisemitism in the early 1950s. This fit into his general pattern of paranoia that groups within the Soviet Union, whether Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, etc. might be under foreign influence and therefore be a threat to the Soviet state. In his paranoid mind, the ties between West Germany, the United States, and the newly formed Israel were a threat. There is some evidence he was planning a purge of Soviet Jews at this time. Luckily, he was not taken as seriously by underlings at this point as he had been in the 1930s, and he died before he could set any of these events in motion. Echoes of his paranoid rantings linking Nazis and Jews surfaced in Poland as late as the 1960s and 1970s, and I think we hear some echoes of this in the bizarre and seemingly illogical Russian rantings about “denazification” of Ukraine today.

Another theme that struck me was the underlying tension of food insecurity in Europe and the Soviet Union in the pre-war era. This was a motivating factor both in Hitler’s plan to colonize Eastern Europe and exterminate whoever was in the way, clearing the way for German farmers, and in Stalin’s depraved grain quotas imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, in which peasant farmers were forced to grow grain for export but executed if they were found eating it themselves. Neither of these was a rational response to food insecurity, of course, but I think it holds lessons for us today. In the United States and much of the world, we have taken food security for granted for many decades now. As climate change takes hold, other environmental problems mount (soil erosion? ocean acidification? groundwater mining?), and population continues to grow (though slowly decelerating), the future of global food supply is not secure. On top of the technical and environmental challenges, food insecurity can trigger mass migration, civil unrest, geopolitical instability and even war, which in turn can exacerbate environmental and food supply problems in a vicious feedback loop. These are tough, tough problems, but one thing we can try to do is keep a focus on global peace and stability so we at least have a chance to focus our technological and economic prowess on solving the food security issue.

fairy tales

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The Spectator has a review of a new book on the origin of fairy tales. I tended to think “fairies” were Celtic in origin, but this article talks about Middle East, French, and Nordic origins among others. And some were just invented by Hans Christian Andersen, who apparently stayed in Charles Dickens’s house at some point and severely outstayed his welcome.

supply, demand, and prices do not really exist

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This statement by James Galbraith makes my head spin a bit.

Just as Einstein had erased Euclid’s axiom of parallels, Keynes’s General Theory had long since obliterated the supply curves for labor and saving, thereby eliminating the supposed markets for labor and capital.

It followed that the prices of production were set by costs (mostly labor costs and interest rates), while quantities were determined by effective demand. Markets were not treated as if they were magical. It was obvious that most resources and components did not move under the influence of an invisible hand. Rather, they moved according to contracts between companies on terms set by negotiation, as had been the case for more than a hundred years. Technology was managed by organizations – mostly by large corporations – in what was sometimes called “the new industrial state.”

Project Syndicate

This is in a review of a book arguing that prices are really important. It’s a bit disturbing to me to think that there might not be a consensus among economists about how the economy actually works. We ordinary people can grasp theories like prices equilibrating supply and demand, and even how interest rates are related to the money supply and inflation, if we try really hard. But we assume the experts understand this stuff on a much deeper level, and that it is fundamentally science. If our understanding of civilization turns out to be based on pseudoscience, we might be in trouble.

Ghettoside

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I’m reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, a book about homicide in Los Angeles between the late 1980s and early 2000s. The word “ghetto”, by the way, might seem loaded but it is how residents and police referred to the neighborhood that is the focus of the book. It’s a very interesting and also disturbing book. It tells a little bit different story than what I have been reading in books and the media elsewhere. In the view of this book, a central factor in high homicide rates, at least in Los Angeles at the time covered in the book, is that police departments don’t solve murders of black men and boys at the same high rates that they solve murders of other groups. This leads to a situation of lawlessness where a sort of “law of the street” develops. In this view, people would actually like more help from the authorities if they felt it was fair and professional, but they don’t believe they can get it so they take matters into their own hands.

The book talks about disputes and arguments among men and boys getting out of hand and leading to cycles of revenge and retaliation. Homicide detectives do their best, but even the best homicide detectives have limited capacity, and training new ones is difficult. When there is a spike in homicides, the supply of good homicide detectives does not increase in kind. Cases get rushed and a smaller fraction of the total get solved. People correctly learn that they are likely to get away with murder, and that contributes to the feedback loop. In Los Angeles at the time, the situation escalated to the point that total strangers were murdering each other simply for being in the wrong neighborhood or wearing the wrong color clothing.

The book argues that Los Angeles at the time was diverting resources from investigating and solving homicides to “violence prevention” and “predictive policing” programs, which were politically popular but less effective than simply solving more cases would have been. It also argues that people can feel harassed and overpoliced at the same time they might support more investigation and solving of violent crime cases if they felt it was fair and effective. I hear echoes of this in the media during the current homicide wave we are experiencing in many U.S. cities. Maybe the violence prevention approaches have improved and have more evidence behind them, but we do hear both that homicide is way up and that the clearance rate is down. And we perpetually hear about the idea of a lack of trust and respect between police and residents of primarily black neighborhoods.

It’s interesting that the crimes discussed in the book are almost all gun crimes, but this is not a book that focuses on guns. Nor does it focus on the drug trade. It focuses on the people involved and their motivations on all sides, from victims to perpetrators to police. It mentions a few police shootings of suspects in passing, but this is also not a focus of the book.

Big History

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I hadn’t heard of Big History, and this article in Aeon is actually critical of it, but it sounds interesting as an attempt to fuse natural and social science into a curriculum.

The Big History narrative itself is given shape by the interplay between the forces of entropy and complexity that are represented, respectively, by the second law of thermodynamics and evolution. The second law of thermodynamics postulates that there is a finite amount of energy in the Universe that is slowly dissipating, but evolution shows that there are moments when a particular threshold is reached and overcomes entropy by the creation of new forms of complexity. Big History proposes there are eight ‘threshold moments’, when profoundly new forms of complexity appear in the past: (1) the Big Bang; (2) stars and galaxies; (3) new chemical elements; (4) the Earth and solar system; (5) life on Earth; (6) the human species; (7) agriculture; and, our currently proposed geological epoch, (8) the Anthropocene.

Aeon

A lot of thinkers I admire, among them Howard T. Odum (not mentioned in this article), have focused on entropy as a sort of defining principle to understand the universe we find ourselves embedded in. Our universe is spirally toward disorder and randomness, but that process is very slow and somehow we find ourselves in a tiny pocket of increasing order within that universe. It starts with the Earth somehow orbiting the sun, and continues with life, the purpose of which seems to be to continue creating order out of chaos where mere physics and chemistry leave off, and then it seemingly culminates in intelligent life and the things intelligent life is able to create.

That’s my quick take from a skim of the article, but this article references a number of articles and books by the Australian developer of the Big History idea (the somewhat ironically named David Christian, because this is a system of belief at least somewhat intended as an alternative to traditional religion.) There is also a TED talk out there for people who like that sort of thing (give me a book, please), and apparently a middle- to high-school curriculum developed by the Gates Foundation.

a new book about longevity research

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We should try to be more like the Galapagos tortoises, which achieve a state of “negligible senescence” and stay there for many decades. This is according to a new book called Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older without Getting Old. From the New York Times (which, just as a reminder, I will never subscribe to until/unless they apologize for lying to me about weapons of mass destruction):

This is, in fact, “what we should aim for,” Steele says: “a risk of death, disability, frailty and illness which doesn’t depend on how long ago you were born.” In precise and sometimes dense detail he lays out the means by which science could effectively eliminate human aging. These approaches fall into four categories: “removing bad things that accumulate,” “renewing things which are broken or lost,” “repairing things which are damaged or out of kilter” and “reprogramming our biology to slow or reverse aging.”

New York Times

Overpopulation and funding pensions might become an issue in such a world. Then again, if we are really losing our ability to reproduce through natural means, we might need to become a living dead species just to be able to stick around for awhile.