Category Archives: books and book reviews

We Need 250 States

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Have you heard about the folks who want to create North Colorado? The reader who sent me the link suggested that it was time to plug my essay We Need 250 states. There, I wrote,

In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic.

We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units. We need to break the political entities in the United States down to a manageable size.

I have just started reading America 3.0, by James Bennett and Michael Lotus. One of the early chapters offers a utopian scenario for America in 2040 in which there are 71 states. In that scenario, people have sorted themselves in part by political preferences. That would not work for someone like me, who lives in a blue state but who does not want to move. I think we need the option of virtual citizenry. Imagine I paid user fees in Maryland for specific services here, but for most tax and policy purposes I lived in a virtual state with other libertarian-minded folks.

Yet another idea for an Education Start-up

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So, I tried to read my free review copy of The UnStoppables, by Bill Schley. I hate his writing style, but I think that on substance the book, which is a guide/pep-talk for entrepreneurs, is actually good. In talking about how to come up with a business idea, Schley suggests asking yourself these questions (p. 22):

1. I wish I could, so why can’t I?

2. What if?

3. How come no one ever fixed that?

4. Why does this have to be such a pain?

For a long time, I have wished that I could better navigate the world of online learning. What if there were a guide for online learning that students could use to find the best resources and that educators could use to benchmark the competition and share resources? There are lots of great learning videos online, but there is a lot of garbage, and it’s not easy to get straight to the best. How come no one ever fixed that? As a teacher, I find it very difficult to share learning resources with other teachers–using some of their videos, adopting some of their online quizzes, etc. Why does this have to be such a pain?

On my recent vacation, I saw how Rick Steves and tripadvisor.com have gone a long way toward solving these problems for travel. So my latest idea for an education start-up is something like a Rick Steves or tripadvisor.com for online learning resources.

The Rick Steves model ensures consistency of how evaluation takes place, and it gives you the voice of a dedicated, opinionated consumer. The tripadvisor.com model uses crowd-sourcing, so you get less consistency of methodology but broader, timelier coverage.

Let’s assume the Rick Steves model, and take first-year statistics as the prototype. If you were Rick, you would list the topics that you think generally belong in such a course. Then go through all the online materials available from Khan, Kling, Udacity, Coursera, Carnegie-Mellon, etc., and create a model itinerary for students. If one of these brands just dominates in every topic within first-year statistics, then recommend that brand. Otherwise, for each topic, list the top three explanatory videos, the top three sets of interactive exercises, etc.

It is important to remember that your perspective is that of a typical student, not that of someone with an advanced background in statistics. Your advanced background may lead you to over-rate deep, brilliant lecturers (like Udacity’s Thrun) and under-rate folks like Khan who keep it simple and glide past issues that someone pursuing a Ph.D in stats would want to treat more carefully.

Two factors would make the online learning space harder to profit from than the travel space. First, the online learning world changes more rapidly. It takes a couple of years to put up a new hotel. It takes much less time to put up a new lecture or quiz on the central limit theorem. So you couldn’t sell printed books easily, since they would be out of date before they are published. Even with a web site, a lot of the work you do in 2013 will have to be tossed out or re-done in 2014.

The second factor is that it would be harder to generate revenue from advertising. Travel web sites are complementary to the existing bricks-and-mortar folks (hotels, restaurants, rental car companies), who get the concept of advertising. Bricks-and-mortar educators, on the other hand, view the online world as a competitive threat rather than as a pure complementary good. It’s not clear that a for-profit university or textbook publisher would see any point in advertising on the sort of site that I have in mind.

Alberto Mingardi’s Reading List

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Compiled in 2002, it is here, and I am sorry to say that I have (so far) read none of these works.

Pointer from Amy Willis.

Mingardi writes,

Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press, 1996, reprint) regarded by Leo Strauss as “an inquiry into the ‘order of human things,’” is fundamental. Schmitt conceptualizes the “political” in terms of a primordial and definitive antithesis between “friend” and “enemy” (“foe”). The very existence of the state rests on this dichotomy. This means that, far more than being a third, “impartial” actor, the state is always the expression of a particular group of individuals. Schmitt teaches that no political order can be conceived as universal, but always and only as a form that originates from a concrete partiality. Against the manipulated justification of government by law, Schmitt’s realism demonstrates how, in reality, there are no abstract institutions, but only clusters of men counterposed as “friends” and “enemies.”

This is what my father (no libertarian) always tried to impress upon me. Politics is about conflict. The “public good” is a woolly concept. So, for that matter is “the state.” Many of the other books on Mingardi’s list appear to treat “the state” as if it were a single individual, rather than an arena through which various individuals and groups engage in conflict.

My Latest Review Essay

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About The End of Power by Moises Naim, I write.

Naim combines strong conceptual thinking with an ability to summon impressive statistical evidence. His book is particularly valuable in showing the importance of growth and change happening in the emerging economies of the world. If those of us who lean libertarian differ from Naim’s conclusions, we should still be aware that his views are much closer than ours to those of most of the world’s elite.

It might be interesting to compare and contrast his book with my book on the knowledge-power discrepancy.

My ebook reviewed in the WSJ

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By Barton Swaim.

One reason American political culture has become polarized and uncivil, Mr. Kling believes, is that each side puts its contentions almost exclusively in terms of its favored language, and fails to see that contrary opinions are manifestations of a different language rather than evidence of stupidity or duplicity.

I notice that The Three Languages of Politics also has ten favorable reader reviews.

Moises Naim Watch

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Mark Manson writes,

One of my best friends recently told me that the prestigious multinational corporation he worked for was itching to permanently send him to India. They wanted him to manage their expansion into that market. And, obviously, India is a huge emerging market. They gave him the Godfather offer to go — enough money to live in a mansion, with personal chefs, private drivers, everything. The irony, of course, was that my friend is a first generation Indian-American. His parents gave up everything decades ago and fought their way to the US to give their kids opportunities they would never have had back in India. They succeeded. What they didn’t expect was that that opportunity for their son they gave up everything for? It was back in India.

One of my big take-aways from Naim’s The End of Power is that emerging economies have a lot going for them. If the future belongs to auto-didacts, it also belongs to people who are comfortable living in more than one country.

What I’m Reading

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New books by Kevin Williamson and by Tim Kane and Glenn Hubbard. Both take as their premise the thesis that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal course. In The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome, Williamson treats this as an opportunity, while in Balance, Kane and Hubbard treat it as a threat. Perhaps it would be appropriate at some point to jointly review them at length.

If I might boil the Kane-Hubbard book down to one sentence, it would be that without a balanced budget amendment to avert fiscal collapse, America will lose its great power status. I can imagine conservatives, thinking in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, nodding firmly in agreement. However, by the same token, I can picture progressives and libertarians shrugging with indifference.

Williamson appears to be in the latter category. So far (I am less than 1/3rd finished), the book is assembling a standard array of libertarian arguments. Anyone who already resonates to the freedom-coercion axis is bound to like it. My guess is that Williamson is headed toward an embrace of what I have called civil societarianism. So far, it looks as though he is arguing for views that I share, although he expresses them with greater certitude.

From Permanent Press to Permanent Clean

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Walter Russell Mead writes,

A Kickstarter success story making the rounds of the Internet this week caused us to perk up our ears here at Via Meadia. A Brooklyn-based company called Wool & Prince has developed a dress shirt that doesn’t require ironing and can be worn for extended periods of time without it starting to stink.

Pointer from Nick Schulz, who reminds me that in our book we talked about the progress represented by permanent press and speculated that in the future we might see permanent clean.

What I’m Reading

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1. The New Digital Age, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Before I read it, I had modest expectations. Afterward, I regretted buying it.

2. The End of Power, by Moses Naim. So far, this is a candidate for my favorite non-fiction book of the year. Maybe you have to discount some of my enthusiasm as confirmation bias, but I cannot imagine readers of this blog experiencing disappointment with the book. Expect a longer review from me at some point.