No overlap with Tyler’s list. I don’t know how he got through Jewish Emancipation. I will have to give Whiteshift another try.
My list:
Robby Soave, Panic Attack
David Epstein, Range
Tyler Cowen, Big Business
Kevin Mitchell, Innate
Gregory Zuckerman, The Man Who Solved the Market
Yuval Levin, A Time to Build
I have spent considerable time pondering the last three, and I have essays on them forthcoming.
Levin’s book does not come out until next year. But to repeat it on next year’s list would be forgivable.
I wasn’t able to get an advance copy, so I’ll be reading A Time to Build in late January like everybody else, and I’ll try to speed up my typically slow pace of writing up a review.
But given all of Levin’s prior related works, I can make some guesses at where we’ll disagree.
For example, the book’s description seems to indicate he favors a “salvage operations” / revitalization approach instead of a more radical creative destruction, root-out-and-replace strategy, and it alludes to calls he will make for concrete steps to make institutions more trustworthy.
To me, the widespread scandalous defects in this regard cannot be repaired with kludges to underlying designs which are not able to handle current social conditions. This would be like trying to reinforce the Tacoma Narrows bridge after one sees it start to wobble. It just can’t take the strong winds, and one just has to go back to the drawing board.
No sense staying too sentimentally attached to the old design because it was so beautiful or one really admired the chief engineers. It just doesn’t work anymore, so instead of rebuilding, it’s actually “time to let go.”
The analogy of the assumption of mild weather is the assumption of sufficient levels of mutual goodwill, shared values, and commitments to adhere to traditional norms and practices. But we now face those strong winds: we live in the storm. We don’t just need slightly stronger versions of the bridges we have; we need better, brand new bridges.
In biological terms, the institutional blight has made an invasive-species-level huge leap forward in the host-parasite coevolution arms race, and our current set of host institutions are going to end up like diseased American Chestnut Trees.
Another analogy could be to aging meat. Meat that gets a little old can be recovered with the right spices, sauces, and techniques – even though this is burdensome and still not as good as the fresh stuff. A bit further along and the meat spoils beyond salvage: get rid of it.
My guess is that Levin is going to be pretty harsh on the “drain the swamp” / “burn it down” types. But as any farmer knows, there’s really nothing to do with contaminated crops but to swallow the bitter pill of sunk costs and losses, and take them far away and burn them to ashes, and just start over, hopefully with some lessons learned the hard way.
“My guess is…”
+1
Even Obama said “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”
But I am sure Leon wi.
• “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”
But l am sure we will nevertheless be informed why Trump bad, Obama good. Which is why US politics is so boring and inconsequential. Even Tyler Cowen today is wondering how any federal agency can be reformed.
Reviewing my reading this year I utterly disappointed to see I lacked any discipline and wasted time on over 30 books on US politics. On the bright side I did read twice as much fiction
My two best 2019 non-fiction titles: Sunderland by Robert MacFarlane and Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre by Liao Yiwu which although originally published in 2012 was first published in the US this year.
D’oh, that should be Underland, not Sunderland, by Robert MacFarlane
One interesting and recurrent aspect of this whole debate is that one must first figure out the appropriate level of generality at which to consider the problem. My view is that most commentators and reform advocates are stuck too low, but their next-layer-up critics are also stuck too low, which is part of why we get stuck going in interminable circles in these entrenched, endless debates without ever getting anywhere.
For instance, I am intimately familiar with many areas of operation in the Federal Government for which there is a lot of room for improvement in the low-hanging-fruit / high-bang-for-buck sense of small, cheap, and not-even-that-clever changes with likely big benefits for efficiency and outcomes.
And that’s a lot of potential improvement by what are really mere ‘tweaks’, and not nearly the scale of change one could expect by switching to significantly superior methods and institutions, for example, those that rely on more market-like incentives and mechanisms.
So, what happens is, a reform advocate (or various commissions or consultants or what-have-you) looks at a common big problem and proposes the obvious big-win solution.
Then you get critics that make the equally obvious criticism that the advocate is engaging in wishful thinking, giving too little weight to and being too naive about the institutional, political, cultural, structural … impediments to implementing such reforms, or occassionally being a little more sophisticated and going a little bit further and giving Chestertonian apologetics for those obstacles as frustrating but least worst options in the space of possibilities, the removal of which would break important functions and make things even worse.
So, there are institutions which could be improved, but meta-institutions which prevent that from happening, and which make any analysis about tweaks mostly a futile waste of time (and, my guess is, some subconscious awareness of everything being like this now and settling into a non-optimum local equilibrium, has lead to a sea-change in modal American attitudes in which the ‘fatalistic resignation’ about the way things just are, “we can’t have nice things” – such as one sees as prevalent in some less developed countries – is becoming much more common here.)
The higher level questions are what went wrong in getting stuck here, ‘root causes’, and how do we get it so that we can have nice things again, but without getting stuck again.
Which of course rely on achieving correct and effective consensus answers to even more upstream questions, but the overall point is that wherever one might feel safe stopping (i.e., Pyschology vs. Physics) it’s far, far away from naive proposals for obvious tweaks which will never see the light of day.
You probably thought well of Gores NPRG.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2013/04/what-reinvention-wrought/62836/
Does anybody sane look back on that project and conclude that anything approaching a change worthy of the term “reinvention” was what took place?
Actually, what happened during the late 90’s / early 2000’s illustrates another facet of my general point about our political system having a tendency to get stuck in an unnecessarily bad equilibrium and needing something akin to an exogenous bailout or disruptive shock to kick it into a superior condition that, theoretically, was practically available and feasible at the time even without new technologies, but politically impossible.
Another, more cynical interpretation is that these surprises provided a good cover story / alibi to officials who wanted to change things and who were desperately looking for some new socially acceptable excuse to which the opposition had not yet developed any effective response.
This is how it goes with new football plays too. Eventually someone is going to figure out a new defense to block your new offense, but for a short while, it’s going to work great and maybe get you to the very top of the game. In repeatedly iterated games, maybe that doesn’t matter in the long run and in the grand scheme of things. But in rare opportunities to make a sudden quantum jump from bad to better social equilibrium, you may only need one good opportunity. In personal terms, this is like breaking the ice, making a good first impression, or having the fortune to land that first lucky acting role which catapults one into long-lasting fame.
I think this is the real intellectual stumbling block of the ‘slow and steady’ approach to change of the anti-radicalists (and I think it’s fair to say that Levin is in this camp).
The failure mode of getting stuck in a way that only sudden, major, scary leaps can fix is one they very much dislike acknowledging.
For example, it wasn’t absolutely necessary for the internet and smartphones to come along to enable the superior equilibrium we have now with things like Uber. Prior to that there were pirate taxis and gypsy cabs which were already experimenting with alternative methods of dispatch, pricing, and service, and which tended to lower prices by adding “gig”-type slack-availability supply to demand. Of course all of that was totally illegal and cities tended to enforce the medallion system, locking everything so much in place that even the established, regulated taxi companies made absolutely no moves toward using new communications technologies to increase because their business model was protected to the point of being written in stone. And enforcement is easy to do against isolated ‘criminals’ because decentralized and unable to scale up their operations quickly and cheaply to the point that the public comes to embrace their new better quality of life.
What Uber was able to do was to use internet and smartphone technologies not just to improve matching and market-making so much, but to take advantage of very low marginal costs and economies of scale to immediately scale up by orders of magnitude, quickly, and at minimal costs. So quickly, and at such large scale, that they could take huge legal risks with regard to obviously and intentionally breaking the medallion (and maybe other) laws.
So technological developments and basic entrepreneurial incentives ended up bailing us out of the quagmire due to our political system.
As another example, with regards to crime, time-tested techniques of establishing public order and security through harsh but effective methods of investigation, trial, and punishment were available, but mostly judicial and some legislative developments came close to wiping out effective deterrence and the ability of police to keep criminals off the streets.
We didn’t need new material technology, because we had adequate social technology. We just made using it illegal.
Fortunately, police tried to adapt and circumvent those new onerous requirements, and new technologies – cheap DNA tests is one, but also, especially those related to electronic surveillance, sensing, and large database manipulation – bailed out law enforcement and helped boost that factor (among many others) contributing to higher clearance rates and lower crime.
Something similar happened (oh so slowly, and many years behind the private sector) to the bloated bureaucracy. There was a lot of low hanging fruit when it came to automation and efficiency, but it was basically politically impossible to pick it (except in the military, where it’s much easier politically to ‘demobilize’ and simply dictate hundreds of thousands of layoffs, which is what Clinton did.)
But then the IT boom came in and bailed out the political problem, gradually allowing for some reduction in the overall federal civilian workforce.
I love these lists. Keep the suggestions coming.
1. Allow me to mention a book from last year: Sir Paul Collier’s book _The future of capitalism_ which seems to have come out last year, 2018.
2. Acemoglu and Robinson’s _The narrow corridor_ looked good, but that’s a hunch from browsing it. It’s a 2019 book.
3. Deirdre McCloskey’s _Why liberalism works_.
P.S.: I do enjoy Handle’s cynical take on things. Perhaps another day we can discuss his views at greater length.
I would add Andrew McAfee’s “More from Less”. The trends were not new to me but I like the “dematerialization” name and I enjoyed the sections that he drilled down into the details.
Andrew McAfee’s “More from Less”
Yes, I think this is an important book. We have Greta Thunberg as Person of the Year. Now while she is representative of something that is important (the need to get governments in particular to act) the profound misinformation contained in her/ dark green’s/ extinction rebellion’s position needs to be countered, not least of all to stop the worthwhile bits of their campaigns being disregarded as the inaccuracies become clear.
Kevin Mitchell’s Innate is very good. Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us What We Are (admittedly 2018) covers some of the same ground, especially the coming orthodoxy that there are very few “genes for”. Most characteristics depend on hundreds or even thousands of genes. Plomin is the dean of twin and adoption studies, and probably a too enthusiastic proponent of “polygenic scores”.
That “coming orthodoxy” is also a foundation of Rudolf Nesse’s Good Reasons For Bad Feelings: Insights From the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry.
I also liked Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Vice in Human Evolution. He begins with the observation that trying to put 150 chimps on an airplane would result in fighting, even death–a lot of “reactive aggression”. Very few animals can stay so close. But humans will board and sit and deplane peacefully. On the other hand, he says, no chimps would ever get together to put a bomb on a plane–much less planned aggression. His thesis is that humans “self-domesticated”; there is a lot in the book about the Belyaev fox domestication experiment.
More current is Robert Pondiscio’s How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice, about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies in New York City. He is a fan, though he is clear about how extreme they have to be to achieve what they do. After you finish it, check out Education Realist’s criticism, starting with the October 19, 2019 post.
Finally, Ray Locker’s Haig’s Coup: How Richard Nixon’s Closest Aide Forced Him From Office. Together with his Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration (2016), it provides the only explanation I have seen that makes sense of all that gets called Watergate–but which could still easily be wrong! The amount of sloppy investigation and lying and destruction of potential evidence is amazing.
I added two Randolph Nesse books to my ToDo list. Thanks.
Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (with George C. Williams, yes, the G.C. Williams, 1995), a.k.a. Evolution and Healing, is very interesting. When I get a cold, I now welcome a fever, knowing it will help disable whatever is causing me to be sick. Fever is a Chesterton fence.
I can recommend Whiteshift, very thoughtful, perceptive and informative analysis. Not keen on the title, but I dislike race talk generally.
I thought Bryan Caplan’s “Open Borders” was a surprisingly effective format. Too bad it is not a book about Homo sapiens.
“Too bad it is not a book about Homo sapiens.”
A great line for a good point!
For anyone interested in war (and if you’re not, it’s still interested in you) don’t miss Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs.