Category Archives: Book Review

In Our Hands – Charles Murray

“The real problem advanced societies face has nothing to do with poverty, retirement, health care, or the underclass. The real problem is how to live meaningful lives in an age of plenty and security.”

The idea of a negative income tax is one of the few public policies that seems to appeal to both left and right, though admittedly the left prefers the name basic income or guaranteed minimum income. In brief, the idea is that people making less than a given amount get money from the state until they are making that amount: those that make more than that get a reduced subsidy or nothing. In principle, it can then replace a diverse set of loophole-rich, easily abused welfare programs, appealing to the right; and ensures that no one in society is without a certain basic wage, appealing to the left.

Tax reform is not exactly an issue with wide appeal. In Our Hands makes the case for a negative income tax by talking not just of the cost savings but also of the social and political implications, making the book of wider interest than just to economists. Murray lays out the possibly savings from eliminated welfare programs, and argues that though a negative income tax isn’t economical yet, it will be in the next few years as costs and populations increase. By ensuring everyone has a stake in society and some source of income, he argues, it also encourages responsible citizenship and participation in the world.

He neglects some questions that seem of interest, however. Long run, some might worry that pseudo-classes defined by whether someone receives the benefit could form. The policy is also vulnerable to politics: as soon as it is created it will be subject to massive political fights which, based on the current disputes about minimum wage, will have little to no relationship to reality on either side, and keeping it to the optimal level might be difficult.

The book is unabashedly an argument from the right, and in some ways that’s the book’s greatest weakness; many on the left might also support the policy, but I’m not sure In Our Hands is the book to sell them on it. That said, for a left wing reader willing to make the effort, the book does have information and arguments for both sides. Murray’s design also has some odd parts, such as giving $5,000 to all citizens, rather than eliminating it over a certain income bracket to reduce costs. Still, an important policy, and a good way for someone without a background in tax to start thinking about some of the issues, though much more needs reading (and writing!) to reach conclusions.

Vipassana Meditation Retreat – Dhamma Dipa

I’ve just gotten back from a 10 day silent meditation retreat, and thought I’d provide some initial thoughts for those considering it. In brief, it was 10 days on the Welsh-English border learning Vipassana meditation – the organization that runs it has centers all over the world. Discipline is strict: no communication of any kind with other meditators or the outside world, no reading or writing, no killing of anything, no intoxicants, about 11 hours a day of meditation. The idea is to work as if you were in isolation.

In essence, the philosophy behind Vipassana is that unhappiness is caused by craving things. Unfortunately, that’s an unconscious reaction; when we feel something, we either want more of it or less of it depending on the sensation. The only way to break the cycle, it argues, is to use meditation to train your unconscious mind and build a habit of not responding with craving when you feel something.

The bad first.

It was unbelievably tough. Just brutal. I wasn’t too worried about not talking for 10 days: I’m pretty happy staying in my head. What I didn’t anticipate was how tough it would be not to hear others talking. For 10 days, I had almost no external input: no new things to see or do, no conversations, no books. Everything I thought about had to come from within me. My mind started spading over the weirdest memories – books and events from decades ago – just in search of something to think about!
It could feel vaguely cultish at times. In justice, I don’t think it is at all; it’s just hard to make anything that involves a bunch of people sitting quietly in a room feel totally normal, particularly with a guy chanting in the background. It’s just so far outside our normal experience.

The good: Despite how tough it was, it was definitely worth it, for several reasons.

My meditation practice got a lot better. Anyone who has tried meditation knows how tough it is to focus your mind for long. I’m a lot better at it, I felt like I was really progressing and learning every day, and my understanding of how it works has dramatically increased.
It was interesting to try the monastic lifestyle. Centuries ago it wasn’t uncommon, but today it’s rare to try such a low-stimulus environment. I think you learn a lot about yourself, and learn to appreciate more subtle things in the world around you. Only by trying very different things, really pushing the envelope, can you find what you yourself enjoy.
It was a chance to think about profound issues like what an enlightened person would look like and what makes us happy. There are lectures in the evening on the philosophy behind it all, and it’s a great opportunity to really reflect on the deep issues we don’t have time for in our everyday lives. The lectures are fairly Buddhist, but you can ignore that part if you want.

Bottom Line: Worth it, but not for the faint of heart! I’m not sure they have Truth, but I think there’s definitely some worthy truths in it.

Addendum: it’s a system based on Buddhism, but for what it’s worth, I’m not Buddhist, nor do I have any plans to become so. The retreat center didn’t mind at all, and actively emphasizes they don’t expect conversion or even willingness to consider conversion.

The Seagull – Anton Chekhov

I’m going to be away for the next two weeks, and so won’t be blogging: take it as a chance to work on that stack of books you’ve got lying around!

“You can’t have too many English Seagulls: at the intersection of all of them, the Russian one will be forever elusive.” – Tom Stoppard

The best known Russian works tend to be long, philosophical novels, in which characters represent whole philosophies. War and Peace, Brothers K, Crime and Punishment, and many others are all justly famous. As a result, though, other works, including Chekhov’s The Seagull, are often under-known.

The Seagull focuses on the romantic entanglements of four characters, each of whom also has an artistic and dramatic history: a middlebrow author, an actress past her prime, a rising star of an actress, and an abstract playwright. Conversations revolve around the nature of theatre and artistic expression, with perspectives sometimes in striking contrast to the nature of the play itself. Dialogue is also rich in subtext, with characters frequently skirting around what they mean or discussing one thing while meaning another.

Most broadly, Chekhov aims to capture various approaches to being an artist, and even more to being an artist in love. No one character is right or wrong, but each struggles in their own fashion: the Seagull borrows heavily from Hamlet, even quoting lines from it directly, and elements of the Shakespearean tragic flaw are present in the Seagull as well.

It’s a quick read, as plays often are: I haven’t seen it performed, but I suspect it’s a play worth reading before you see it, simply due to the complexity of the dialogue. Well worth a read.

“A work of art should invariably embody some lofty idea. Only that which is seriously meant can ever be beautiful.”

“Wine and tobacco destroy the individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka you are no longer Peter Sorin, but Peter Sorin plus somebody else. Your ego breaks in two: you begin to think of yourself in the third person.”

“He used to laugh at my dreams, so that little by little I became down-hearted and ceased to believe in it too.”

“It is not the honour and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength to endure. One must know how to bear one’s cross, and one must have faith.”

Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest – Curtis Wilkie

“In the Klan structure, where Code One called for a crossburning, Code Two a whipping, and Code Three an arson attack, the extreme penalty was Code Four — death.”

In 1963, the civil rights activist Medgar Evans was killed by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council. De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 by all-white juries, both of which result in hung juries; not until 1994 was he found guilty, less than two decades ago. In Bill Clinton’s run for office, coming as he did from Arkansas, he placed an overt emphasis on racial reconciliation, and his decisions affect politics today. In a way that many of us not from the American South may struggle to appreciate, taking civil rights for granted, the strife of the 1960s continues to leave scars on the region.

Assassins opens with the story of De La Beckwith’s third trial. Curtis Wilkie was one of the original Boys on the Bus, the group of journalists following the 1972 election between Nixon and McGovern. Since then, he has become known as one of the best journalists covering the American South, particularly his home state of Mississippi. In Assassins, he takes a selection of his articles from various years and subjects and uses them to paint a broader picture: of the American South, of Israel/Palestine (where he lived for a time), of Carter and (Bill) Clinton, both of whom he knew personally, and even of a gubernatorial race between a playboy and a Ku Klux Klan leader in Lousiana and a lesbian colony in Mississippi.

Wilkie has spent his life covering these issues, and it shows. The book is insightful and entertaining. For those of us who didn’t grow up in the American South, it’s also enlightening. Readers may know about Freedom Summer, when college students from across the US came to Mississippi to help register African-Americans to vote, but reading of the multiple murders of activists and the trials paints a striking picture of the South that seems almost unthinkable now, only two generations later. For readers with little knowledge of the subject, but an interest in understanding what the South was like at the time, well worth a read.

Disclosure: I read Assassins as an advance reader copy.

The Smartest Kids in the World – Amanda Ripley

“PISA revealed what should have been obvious but was not: that spending on education did not make kids smarter. Everything — everything — depended on what teachers, parents, and students did with those investments.”

In Korea, one big test at the end of school decides everything: an extreme meritocracy in school creates what is almost a caste system for adults with your entire future decided by how you did on the exam. In Finland, the stress is lower for students but higher for teachers, with only 8 universities giving degrees in teaching, and all of them as competitive as MIT to get into. Both countries, however, are top performers on the international PISA tests, a method of comparing educational achievement across countries, dramatically outscoring the US and others.

The Smartest Kids in the World takes the PISA test as a way of finding out which countries are doing well, and then tries to understand what has led to their success. It’s a whirlwind tour of the high school experience in Korea, Finland, and Poland, three top achievers, and the reforms that got them that way.

Ripley’s bottom line, though she doesn’t say it quite this way, is that reforming education isn’t magic or even surprising. It means agreeing on common goals for the system, training teachers well, making the subject matter rigorous and not being afraid to fail students if they don’t learn it, and above all keeping expectations for students and teachers high. Not rocket science, but it’s amazing how hard the special interest groups in the US can make it.

Lots of things go into a great educational system, but Ripley makes some profound criticisms of the American model. It’s harder to retain varsity athlete status in the US, for example, than to get into teacher’s college, and the average SAT score of teachers is lower than the national average. Somehow, she argues, America has convinced itself that teachers don’t need to be smart, comfortable with their subject, or even have studied their subject. Based on international comparisons, that isn’t true.

It’s a great book. It’s well written, it’s engaging, it strikes a nice balance between storytelling and analysis that makes it an easy read, and it says something important. It’s a little short on data or real evidence, but because tests making international comparisons possible are relatively new, and so that’s not really a surprise. For anyone wanting to think about education and how the system should work, it’s a quick and interesting read.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

“Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.”

“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going.”

As a third steam age science fiction, we turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Dorian Gray is a young man with everything going for him; he is young, handsome, charismatic, in the flower of manhood. He is also convinced that beauty and pleasure are the highest goods, that “the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality.”

As is pointed out early in the novel, however, all that will fade with time: as he ages he will lose his beauty, and with it his social prestige and his status. So Dorian makes a Faustian bargain: his portrait will age and wither while he remains fresh and young, unblemished by a life of sordid activities.

The book is in some ways a classic tale of a deal with the devil, in which the protagonist goes from bad to worse. It is different, however, in the way that many of Wilde’s tales are different: it is not always obvious what Wilde himself believes. Unlike in Faust, where we can generally assume that Goethe is anti-devil though sympathetic to Faust, Wilde sounds at times actively supportive of Dorian’s ideas, giving the tale a very different slant.

At root, the story itself is perhaps not the most compelling: it can feel long where it should have been short. It is saved though by Wilde’s ability to turn a phrase: it is full of memorable quotes and lines, many of which persist today in comments like the world knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’ or that ‘it is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’

“All sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.”

“There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.”

Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne

“What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men! Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?”

Now, despite suggesting in my last post that I was doing steam age science fiction, it must be admitted that Around the World in 80 Days isn’t actually science fiction: the whole point was that it was a journey that was at least theoretically possible at the time. If anything, it is a study of the British Empire at the time, with memorable comments on all the colonies and areas they pass through as well as on British attitudes about each. My favourite, I think, occurs when they are about to be attacked by bandits while on the train across America, where the comment is made that ‘it may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans usually are, when they are prudent there is a good reason for it.’

Science fiction is often portrayed as boys’ novels, targeted to those who don’t read real fiction. This, I think, is unfair. Science fiction often neglects the sort of character development found in Dickens, true. But in return it allows for a clear focus on a single aspect of society, distilled by its removal from impurities and complicating elements that pervade our own societies. As a result, it often has profound things to say about the world we live in, as well as the worlds we might aspire to see happen, whether that’s about the future of robotics and by extension lesser beings in Asimov, or the nature of globalization in Verne. They can also inspire, as 80 Days does, by evoking a passion for adventure and a desire to see new things.

The classic picture of Phineas Fogg in a balloon is, unfortunately, false: they don’t use a balloon at all in the story. Often ignored is also the fact that he finds love on the adventure: rather than being a celebration of the modern world and consumption, in the end, Fogg is left with the classic reward of all such tales: true love, and happiness ever after.

PS – Interesting fact for West Wing (and Nellie Bly) fans: Nellie Bly did the trip herself as a homage for her newspaper, meeting up with Verne in Amiens after 72 days. Michael Palin of Monty Python fame refused to use aircraft, and managed it in 79 days and 7 hours, slightly longer than Fogg.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

As the summer ends, I thought I’d brush up on some steam-age science fiction: Jekyll and Hyde, Around the World in 80 Days, and Picture of Dorian Gray. First up: man and beast!

“It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation of my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”

Jekyll and Hyde is of course well known to most of us, even if that’s from watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The original text though has some interesting differences. Modern characterization tend to show Hyde as large and brutal, almost an ogre of a man: he has served as inspiration for Batman’s Two-Face and the Hulk. In the original, though, he is significantly smaller than Jekyll, representing the fact that Jekyll’s life had been mostly good, not evil. Instead of intimidating size, all who see him report that he gives ‘an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.’

Perhaps more profoundly, the original text focuses on the psychology of a clash between good and evil within a person. In many ways, it is the story of the fall: a man’s descent into evil, as he gradually loses control of his darker side until his only escape is suicide. Jekyll himself notes though that there are many sides to a man, and good and evil represents only two: indeed, Hyde may be evil, but Jekyll is by no means good, suggesting a duality may be overly simplistic.

The need to bite back comments or restrain ourselves from impulsive action is hardly a stranger to any of us, I suspect. Though satisfying in the short run, such decisions are rarely desirable in the long. For Jekyll, though, the problem is more acute: Hyde himself has no such restraints, but a single lapse for Jekyll in succumbing to the transformation leads to many transgressions. Though less obvious for the rest of us, we often face a similar problem: once we have succumbed once, we develop an attachment to the behaviour, and may never be free of it. Abstention, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, may be superior to moderation.

The End of Normal – James K. Galbraith

“The 1970s were not an interlude brought on by shocks, bad management, and policy mistakes – but instead, in certain respects, a harbinger of the world conditions that we now face and from which we will not, on this occasion, so easily escape.”

“There remains one alternative. It is to engineer the economy to grow at a low, stable, positive rate for a long time, and to adjust ourselves materially and psychologically to that prospect. It is to pursue slow growth: a rate above zero but below what cheap energy and climate indifference once made possible.”

For all the books on the financial crisis, I think most people struggle to understand what happened, or even differentiate it from the European sovereign debt crisis or related issues. James Galbraith, as befits the son of one of the best known economic historians of earlier in the century, John Kenneth Galbraith (a Canadian!), takes a long view of it, looking at broad trends of demography, world finance, and technology.

Galbraith emphasizes the oft-ignored role of resource prices in driving – and slowing – economic growth. At root, he argues, we rely on resources to fuel our economies and our bodies. When they become scarce or expensive, we must give up our resource-intensive activities and accept a lower intensity of civilization, or face destruction. When the meteor hit, and sunlight became scarce, the dinosaurs gave up space to smaller mammals that were less resource intensive: he suggests we should think of our society from a similar frame, and choose a level of resource intensity appropriate to resource availability. The financial crisis isn’t a deviation from the mean, but rather a signal of things to come.

The book addresses an important issue, and from a relatively novel perspective. Predicting the future is always hard, and Galbraith wisely spends more time on first principles than on trying to predict future conditions, other than saying they won’t be great. The book’s weakness is in structure: non-economists may find it difficult to follow. Galbraith leaps around from idea to idea and engages with things he disagrees with rather than advancing his own ideas, so some ideas can be hard to keep track of unless you already know the literature. In his attempts to make it accessible, it also feels a bit superficial at points: criticizing economists for finding their models beautiful seems a bit irrelevant. Not the last word on the subject, but definitely a start, and very much an underdiscussed issue.

Excellent Sheep – William Deresiewicz

“The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but are also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose…great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

“Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.”

“People go to monasteries to find out why they have come, and college ought to be the same.”

Elite colleges tell their students how special they are, how they were picked from an enormous pool of possible applicants and showed themselves better than all the rest. In 1957, the Dean of Yale took a rather different view: welcoming the new students, he told them how large a pool of applicants they’d had that year, and pointed out that had they rejected every student in the room, they could still have had a great incoming class. Each student, he argued, was responsible for showing why they deserved to be accepted. The modern version has rather a different emphasis.

In recent years, between a third and a half of graduates of elite US colleges with a job head to finance or consulting. In contrast to the popularity of those fields, whole areas have disappeared: clergy, military, teaching, electoral politics, even academia to a lesser extent. Excellent Sheep worries that this stems from the warped perspective promoted by these colleges, that in telling the students endlessly that they are the elite and the special, they rule out whole worlds of possibility by implying they are a waste of a fancy education. Schools, Deresiewicz argues, are complicit in this because they like the fat donations they receive from graduates in consulting or finance, far more than they receive from a happier but poorer graduate who ends up as a minister or teacher.

Where the book suffers is when it turns to broader societal implications. The author’s background is in English, and though that should never be a bar to writing anything, in this case it betrays him a little when he attempts to look at issues of policy, society, and statistics. He also doesn’t really have any insight into structural solutions: his advice to students to go to a second tier school is all very well, but hardly scalable.

The value of such books though is what they make the reader think, rather than just what the author says. Reflecting on my own experience, I’ve largely been spared the lost or aimless feeling Excellent Sheep describes, despite being lucky enough to attend an elite college. My advantage, I think, is no surprise to readers of the blog: that I read widely. Any student seeking to find a sense of self and wisdom through their education needs to get beyond the bubble of their friends and professors, and reading is a great way to do that, to engage in debate with some of the foremost minds of our species, living and dead. Exposure to such great ideas and new perspectives can ground you, and provide a frame of reference very different from your own.

Deresiewicz also suffers from some of the same blind spots he criticizes elite schools for: he makes no effort to find out what students from top state schools do, for example, appearing to forget that schools other than the Ivy Leagues even exist as anything other than an abstraction. Nevertheless, Excellent Sheep’s opening sections are interesting, persuasive, and well-written. For those alone, the book is worth reading, and I recommend it. If the second half falls a bit short, that’s not the end of the world. As a book that makes you consider your own education – or lack thereof – it’s well worth it.