Author Archives: Nick

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.”

“Where men cant [sic] live gods fare no better.”

How do you keep hope when there is little left to hope for? Worse yet, how do you convince others to hope when you are unsure if you have any hope left? Do you lie? Would that make it worse when they found out? Do you honestly confess your own doubts, risking making the other’s worse?

How encouraging to be when things are going badly is always tricky, whether to a friend who lost their job or a child trying a new sport. The extreme, though, is expertly painted by McCarthy in The Road. A post-apocalyptic father and son journey South in the hope of finding a warmer climate. The timid son is confronted by a reality that had his mother abandon them without hope years past, while his father does his best to keep the fire alive. They strike bargains: the son demands his father not give him a larger share of the food they find, for if he is dishonest in small things, how can he be trusted in large things? They face a world in which killing themselves might be merciful, rather than cruel: the father wonders this for himself, but cannot face the reality of doing the same to his son. Given his own doubts, however, how can he keep his son going?

The Road has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, and has also been turned into a relatively successful movie. McCarthy himself has had a series of bestselling books, including All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men, which in its movie version won Best Picture. He is also often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Road is not an uplifting read, but it is an important read, and like all the best fiction, gives the reader a better understanding of his fellow humans and even himself.

Nurtureshock – Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

“The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring — because key twists in the science have been overlooked.”

Can you tell if children are lying? Most adults believe they can: they also frequently believe that boys are more prone to lying than girls, and that younger children lie more than older ones. Sadly, none of that is true. Parents do no better than chance at telling whether random kids are lying, and only slightly better than chance with their own children. Gender does not correlate with lying, and younger children actually lie less than older ones. Less is a relative term, though: in household studies, 96% of kids lie, an average of once an hour for six year olds. Threatening punishment doesn’t appear to make a difference: what helps is emphasizing that telling the truth makes parents happy (since that is often the goal of the child anyway), and the value of honesty more generally.

For all that we were all kids once, it turns out our intuitions about what they are like are depressingly poor. Nurtureshock aims to capture some of the counter-intuitive or novel ideas researchers have found from actually working with large numbers of children, rather than just guessing (Ahem, Freud). Seeing their parents fight isn’t bad for children, it turns out, if they also witness a successful resolution. If the parents end the fight without resolving it, or move it upstairs or otherwise out of the child’s presence, on the other hand, children tend to be more aggressive and act out more afterwards.

Nurtureshock tries to cover a wide range of issues, sometimes at the price of oversimplifying. Some of the chapters are also fairly well known, at least to me, such as Carol Dweck’s work on fixed and growth mindsets. Others, though, raise some great points, ones parents may not even have considered, and even if the treatment is probably too brief to satisfy, it can serve as a useful starting point to tracking down more research. After all, research about kids is usually pretty cute, whether of children singing to themselves to resist eating a marshmallow, or managing to stand still for 2 minutes when asked to stay still, or 11 minutes if asked to mimic a soldier. A challenge for both parenting and teaching is that you often don’t see others parent or teach, and so rarely have your intuitions challenged: a little bit of critical reflection can go a long way.

Climate Shock – Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman

“We, together with most economists, would be fine with either carbon taxes or caps, done correctly.”

What, you might frequently wonder, is geoengineering? If you’re a scifi fan, you’ll know terraforming is shaping the earth’s surface. Geoengineering refers to using similar techniques on Earth, usually particularly in reference to controlling the temperature. The release of particle such as sulfate aerosols help block sunlight from reaching the earth, similar to the effect of the eruption of volcanoes: in 1815, the eruption of Tambora encouraged Mary Shelly to spend her summer holiday indoors, writing Frankenstein. You may think this is better than sliced bread, or absolutely crazy, solving a symptom rather than the disease. Economics, though, says that what you think doesn’t really matter: since geoengineering is relatively easy, so much so it could be done by a single country, it will be hard to stop someone from doing it, whether a rogue climate engineer or Vanuatu as it gradually submerges beneath the waves.

Climate Shock looks at the insights economics can provide as we try to understand and prevent climate change. In particular, it focuses on the economics of uncertainty – how we deal with things when we are unsure of them – and externalities – how people decide to do things when the decision will affect others. Geoengineering is a classic externality (as are carbon emissions): if someone decides to release chemicals into the air because they’re too hot, everyone is affected.

The uncertainty relates to the fact that we really don’t know the potential outcomes of warming. In the Pliocene era, carbon dioxide levels were similar to today, but the seas were 20 meters higher, and Canada had camels. We don’t know how likely that is to happen again, but we probably want to avoid it (unless you’re a camel).

The book is a great survey of some economic insights for global warming, and Martin Weitzman in particular is a titan in the field. My only comment is I suspect it would struggle to convince anyone who isn’t already a believer. If you’re looking to arm yourself with facts about warming to argue with your friends, it’s a great resource: if you’re not sure what to think, less so. Some of their arguments also feel a little hasty, not really engaging with other perspectives. David Friedman, for example, argues that uncertainty cuts two ways: global warming could also end up being good for the world, as well as bad. I’m not sure I find that convincing, but I would have liked to see Climateshock rebut or acknowledge it.  Their final point, however, is a good one: even if everyone agrees that carbon emissions are immoral, and that in itself is unlikely, the immediacy of the problem means taking the economics of it seriously.

You can see more reviews and buy it on amazon here: Climate Shock.

The ABCs of Real Estate Investing (Rich Dad Advisors) – Ken McElroy

How, you might be wondering, would I go about buying an apartment building (or multiplex, or whatever) with the intention of renting it out? First, check out cities: what are supply and demand like? Is there something limiting supply, like an urban boundary? Is population growing, increasing demand? Is a new business moving in, boosting employment? Second, focus on a submarket: if the city is in a downturn, which region or neighbourhood is likely to turn around first? Third, get down to the nitty gritty: focus on gathering as much information as possibly to really get a feel for the area: meet with officials, local real estate agents, etc. At every stage, focus on the big forces of supply and demand, and also on location: is it near services, close to employment, in a good area? Then, buy the property, become wealthy, and wash, rinse, and repeat.

Real estate is an investment niche that frequently appeals to people: unlike the stock market, it provides something concrete that people can admire, and is often easier to understand because everyone owns or rents a house of their own. On the downside, however, it can often require a fair amount of capital to get started, in order to make the down payment, and though house prices generally (though not always) increase, covering the mortgage payments and taxes may mean you’re making less of a return than you would have if you’d just put it in the stock market and forgotten about it.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a tremendously popular series, and has sparked a number of spinoffs, including this one, focused on real estate investing. It is intended for a novice in the field, and focuses on apartment buildings, though many of the lessons are also relevant to single-family homes. McElroy’s approach is also quite mathematical: he focuses on calculating your return on investment, and then using that number to calculate what the building is worth. Buy it only if you can get it for less. Words that could have done a lot for people who suffered in the sub-prime crisis, I suspect.

The book is not as strong as some of Rich Dad Poor Dad’s other works, but if you have a particular interest in real estate, it’s not a bad introduction. I think for most people, though, the sums he talks about in buying and selling apartment buildings make it seem a bit far away: many families have experience buying single family homes, but most haven’t considered buying multi-million dollar apartments. The principles are the same, but it makes it feel less relevant. Still, if you can get past that (or are considering buying apartments yourself!), then a solid introduction to a very popular field.

The Perfect Swarm – Len Fisher

“Simple rules, patterns and formulae can often help us steer our way through, but in the end it is the complexity that rules. OK?”

The world is pretty complicated these days. How, you might wonder, should you best navigate in a world that seems overwhelming? Perfect Swarm argues that we can use simple rules to defeat and exploit complexity. Locusts, for example, have tremendously large swarms – the largest can be 513,000 km2 and contain 12.5 million insects – but their wings are delicate, and if they collide in midair they might die. Fortunately, no ESP is needed to guide the swarm: instead, they individually follow simple rules of avoidance, alignment, and attraction to create a seemingly chaotic mass out of order. Fish, bees, birds, and many other animals do the same.

What does this mean for humans? One fascinating implication for leadership is that if most people are just swarming, even if only a very few members of the group have a clear direction, the entire group will move that way. Charisma, dignity, etc., might all help, but in the end as long as you have a goal and other members of the group don’t, everyone will follow you there. This has even been rather charmingly demonstrated in a room of students asked to wander randomly but not get too far from other students: adding a couple students with a destination to the mix means all the students end up at that destination!

To achieve clarity, the book trades a lot of elegance and detail, and it can sometimes feel oversimplified. The later chapters of the book focus on heuristics (simple rules for decision-making), and perhaps it’s because it is my field, but for me the section felt so simplified as to be hard to extrapolate from. If you’re looking for a fairly simple introduction to chaos theory and how different disciplines have attempted to resolve the problem, though, as well as some personally applicable insights on how to move through a crowd or decide between multiple options, Perfect Swarm can certainly provide.

Dear Undercover Economist – Tim Harford

“When a dinner party guest wonders how much to spend on a bottle of good wine, Dear Economist ignores the Good Wine Guide and reaches for the Journal of Wine Economics.”

What, you might wonder, is the secret to happiness? Harford, citing Kahneman, says that sex is best, but that exercise, food, and prayer are also good. In fact, all human contact is good, except for that with your boss, which is quite bad. The secret to happiness? Don’t have sex with your boss.

Tim Harford is a frequent writer for the Financial Times, and has also published several excellent pop economics books, including The Undercover Economist. Dear Undercover Economist, however, is a collection of advice columns he published in the FT. Written in the classic style of Dear Abby columns, they use economics to answer questions about love, family, careers, and other domains. He gives advice to a man who gives bad first impressions (give a signal of quality, like giving the girl theatre tickets for a third date with him when they first meet); a student who is too busy with his karate club activities to study (gains from trade: find a weakling to do his homework and beat up the weakling’s enemies); someone looking for missing socks (give up on them: instead, focus on interchangeable parts, and just buy all identical socks); and, in response to someone concerned about inflation and the shrinking size of Mars Bars, points out they are actually a very stable unit of account, with about 20,000 bars buying you a small car for the last 70 years.

This is classic pop economics, freakonomics-style. It takes the insights of economics, particularly signalling, screening, and trade, and applies them to problems outside economics’ traditional gaze. I’m not sure I’d take the advice myself, but the columns are entertaining and well written: you could do worse if you’re trying to learn some microeconomics for yourself, or if you’re a student taking microeconomics. After all, how many other opportunities will you have to make economics fun? Overall, a great romp through the insights of economics, applied to everyday problems.

Unfinished Work – Joseph Coleman

“Denial of employment opportunity to older persons is a personal tragedy…It is also a national extravagance, wasteful of human resources. No economy can reach its maximum productivity while failing to use the skills, talents, and experience of willing workers.” – JFK, 1963

You’ve probably heard of the demographic crisis: baby boomers are getting older, people are having fewer children, and pretty soon the pension pot will be all used up on the generation that also brought you global warming. If you’re a young person, you may find the whole thing somewhat depressing: it seems like most public policies are designed to transfer money from (low-income) young people to (high-income) old, whether it’s increasing house prices, fuel subsidies for the elderly, pensions, or healthcare. If you’re the Economist, you’ve also faced a huge flood of complaints when you suggested reducing pensions for wealthy seniors in the UK, and since seniors vote and young people don’t, no one was going to listen to the suggestion anyway.

Coleman presents an alternate, possibly more valuable, perspective. Older workers are often forced out of work before they would actually want to leave, whether because of pension plan design, insufficient training, or blatant discrimination. These older workers would often have preferred to stay, particularly part-time, deriving meaning and value from their employment as they have done for decades. Letting them stay makes them better off, and also helps reduce our demographic challenge.

Unfinished Work looks at this problem from the perspective of elderly workers around the world, from Japan to Sweden, France, and the U.S. Some countries are doing well (Sweden and Japan) and others are doing poorly (France), but all have room to improve. The book’s emphasis on stories makes it more readable, but also reduces the content: the book is better at raising issues than solving them. The book also sometimes seems to lack concrete data: Coleman criticizes discrimination on the part of employers against the elderly, particularly a reluctance to train them, but there is also evidence that elderly people make less good employees. He may well be right this isn’t a large concern, but I would have appreciated some data on how big an issue it might be. Nevertheless, the book advances an important perspective on an increasingly large challenge for many Western societies. This is a problem we don’t think about often enough, and certainly haven’t solved. Unfinished Work presents an alternate framing to the divisive, young vs. old narrative, one well worth reflecting on.

You can see other reviews of Unfinished Work here.

What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions – Randall Munroe

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

I read a lot, but it’s rare I read a book I can recommend unconditionally. This is one of them, with the extra bonus you can read a lot of it in advance online to see if you agree. It’s insightful, it’s hilarious, and best of all it can give you a glimpse into how scientists think, working through the world from first principles.

The book is exactly what the title says: it gives carefully worked out answers to absurd questions, like what would happen if you swam in a nuclear waste pond (nothing – water is great radioactive shielding. Of course, trying to swim in such a pond would get you shot by the guards), hit a baseball going at .9c (Boom!), endured a robot apocalypse (the robots would probably slip on the mountain of skulls and most can’t open doors or pass those tricky rubber thresholds on lab doors. Even most battle drones would be stuck, “helplessly bumping against hangar doors like Roombas stuck in a closet.”) or lived in a world with love at first sight (people would want to be police officers or receptionists, since they make eye contact with the most people).

Munroe was a robotics engineer at NASA, so has good science credentials. He left to run his webcomic, xkcd (which I also highly recommend). His book, however, takes columns from a series he did online, What If, and puts them in convenient book form with some additions – you should definitely read the online column first to see if it’s your thing, and I’m not sure how much new content there is, to be fair.

The book is hilarious, as you’d expect from the author of xkcd. For me, the best part is that Munroe can’t seem to avoid thinking like a physicist. Keeping in mind I started my degree in physics, I love it: it reminds me of the great way scientists have of looking at the world. Analysis like:

“First, let’s start with wild ballpark approximations… I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it.[citation needed] Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram. The number 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 looks about twice as long as a trillion, which means it’s about a trillion trillion. I happen to remember that a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs.”

There is basically nothing I don’t love in that paragraph. This is how reasoning about the world should work, for oh so many reasons!

Shopping for Votes: How politicians choose us and we choose them – Susan Delacourt

“Where politicians once made church basements the fixture of their campaign road trips, the refreshment-stop of choice is no the ubiquitous Tim Hortons…Canadian politics no longer bears much resemblance to the church (except maybe the occasional sermon) but our marketing politicians seem right at home among sales posters, advertising and cash registers.”

Reading the newspaper, it would be easy to believe that politicians make judgments based on polls: 42% support for X, 27% support for Y. The truth, argues Shopping for Votes, is significantly more complicated.

As technology has improved and politicians have gotten better at identifying individual voters, the ability of political parties to target messages more precisely has also increased. Parties now divide voters into archetypes: Zoe, the yoga-loving left wing younger condo owner, or Dougie, a single tradesman who liked to hunt (both archetypes are drawn from the 2006 Conservative strategy in Canada). Zoe would never vote for the Conservatives, so could be safely ignored – Dougie was a potential supporter, and so a key target. In the event, the Conservatives managed to identify 500,000 individual voters they needed to convince to vote Conservative: the millions of others were either already voting Conservative, unlikely to ever vote Conservative, or in non-marginal constituencies. National polls of average support become totally irrelevant, even if everyday voters follow them closely.

The danger, argues Delacourt, is that as a result politics is more polarized than ever. Politicians don’t look for broad, uniting policies: they look for ones that will target their key groups, ignoring the impact or effect on others. The result is that as consumers increasingly shop for the best party, choosing not to identify with any one group, parties also shop for the right voters, offering finely tuned products to different groups. The government is no longer the home of bold national projects or grand ideas, but rather small, carefully targeted ones. As a result, creating a national brand often falls to the private sector. In Canada, that has mean Tim Hortons and Molson ad campaigns are responsible for nationalism, not the government.

It’s a powerful – and interesting – message, and one that I suspect resonates with a lot of voters. The book is a great insight into how political hacks, as opposed to voters, think about elections, and how elections are being changed by trends like big data and better econometrics. An important and useful read, and if nominally targeted towards Canada, relevant to most electoral systems.

In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan

“Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”

There’s a myriad of diets out there, and for all that science suggests that basically all of them contribute to short term weight loss (apparently, paying attention to what you’re eating is a sufficient condition for weight loss) and most of them don’t show any persistence anyway, people still struggle to pick the best one. One thesis is that the Western diet itself is simply bad for us: a group of ten Australian aborigines who resumed traditional lifestyles for seven weeks as part of an experiment saw improvements in blood pressure and their risk of heart disease among other indicators, and also lost 18 pounds. The answer to the Western diet, says Pollan, is to stop eating it.

Pollan argues eating well is simple: we’ve been doing it since we came out of the trees. Unfortunately, it isn’t in the interests of the food industry, journalism, or even nutrition science to keep it that way: after all, if they just said eat more vegetables, we’d fire the lot of them. His goal is to make it simple again.

To do so, he suggests a series of simple rules: don’t eat things your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food; avoid foods with ingredients that are unpronounceable, unfamiliar, or more than five in number; only shop at the edges of the supermarket; have a glass of wine with dinner; only eat a table, and never alone; and a few others.

The book is not as good as some of his others, such as Omnivore’s Dilemma or Cooked. It’s well written though, and to my knowledge probably correct. Several points are enough to make you stop and think, too: I was interested to learn that isolated populations appear to have few dental problems, whether consuming all meat, such as the Masai in Tanzania, no dairy in the Hebrides, or agriculturalists who ate largely plants (though agriculturalists showed the most tooth decay of the three). Overall, In Defense of Food is not a must-read, but if you like Pollan or are interested in food generally, worth picking up.