Category Archives: Book Review

Deceit and Self Deception – Robert Trivers

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – The Brothers Karamazov

One of a number of debates that rages among biologists, social scientists, and various other disciplines is the role of evolutionary theory in explaining behaviour. Almost everyone respects the power of evolutionary theory to describe humanity, but the trick lies in using it properly. Evolutionary biologists like Trivers or Steven Pinker use it widely, and point out that many of the criticisms of their work seem to consist of dislike of the conclusions, not critical argument. There may or may not be difference between the sexes, they say, but disapproving of them doesn’t make them nonexistent.

More sensible critics, however, have a legitimate source of concern. Choose any behaviour, and a reasonable sounding justification from evolution can be concocted to explain it. Of course, such explanations can’t be tested, and it’s usually pretty easy to come up with multiple, conflicting explanations of any such behaviour. Given that, evolutionary explanations may be cute and fun, but it’s not clear they’re much use for anything.

In Deceit, Trivers makes a fairly simple argument: that we have evolved to deceive ourselves, and that such self-deception helps us deceive others and improve our lives. The rest of the book is stories and anecdotes illustrating that point, from the animal kingdom, from politics, and from human behaviour. In West Africa, for example, there are five species of poisonous butterflies. One species has evolved to mimic them: all of them. The mimetic females lay five different kinds of eggs, each of which will mimic a different poisonous species. That way, instead of doubling the frequency of a single poisonous species and making it worthwhile for birds to learn to tell the difference, in any given forest the frequency of each mimic matches the frequency of the model. Some caterpillars, in contrast, curl up like ant larvae and wait to be taken in the nest and fed: once there, they emit the scent of newborn queens, to ensure they get more food than the real ant larvae.

The book is entertaining and has some engaging anecdotes, but you already know the main thesis: it comes as no surprise to anyone who reads fiction that we deceive ourselves, given the essential role it plays in much great literature. If you’d like a deeper look, though, you can get the book here.

Learning To School: Federalism and Public Schooling in Canada – Jennifer Walker

“The evidence therefore indicates that the provinces have defied the odds and found a way to develop and maintain similar policy activities and fashion a de facto pan-Canadian policy framework for elementary and secondary education without the direct intervention of the federal government.”

Canada is the only OECD country without a national department of education. It might be reasonable, therefore, to expect it to have a highly fragmented system, with each province pursuing a unique educational strategy. In reality, however, there is a large amount of standardization between provinces, in terms of financing, curriculum, and assessment.

Whether left or right, all of us find silver bullets appealing: we confront problems or challenges in the world, and we look for the one thing that can solve it all. Of course, most silver bullets seem to corrode when exposed to sunlight, but one that has mostly kept its appeal is education: teach people to be good citizens, to act morally, to be responsible, and a whole lot of problems disappear.

I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but it still means understanding education has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, though I think Learning to School might appeal to specialists, it’s heavy for a general reader: it can read like a phd thesis at times. Her central finding is that the subnational governments do cooperate often without federal intervention, and that learning and cooperate can lead to significant policy similarity – an important finding, but honestly exactly what I would have expected. I had hoped to have an analysis of the effectiveness of those policies, but the book instead focuses on how they evolved. If you want to understand how policies, particularly those about education, can evolve in a federal state, the book is comprehensive: if you want to learn about education, I think there are better choices.

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

“Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

Madame Bovary craves beauty, wealth, passion, and love, measuring her life against the great epics about which she would read. Dissatisfied, she turns to extramarital affairs, to spending she cannot afford, always reaching farther for her idols only to find them covered in gilt. Her life, empty and dissatisfied as it is, is made vivid by the depth of detail and realism as it is told, culminating in the destruction of the lives of those around her and her own self-destruction.

Flaubert would spend 12 hours a day at his desk, painstakingly attending to detail and always searching for le mot juste, the right word. He believed prose should be as perfect as poetry in its word choice, and sought in every sentence to perfectly capture the mood, the atmosphere, and the exact detail of the scene. In doing so, he created an entire literary genre, realist narration, and he is justly considered one of the greatest Western novelists for his influence on authors as diverse as Kafka, Coetzee, and Sartre.

What makes Madame Bovary so good is that attention to detail. The story was begun by Flaubert at the urging of his friends, who hoped to cure his realism by giving him the dreariest subject they could think of. Not, I would observe, the most successful stratagem I’ve heard. Yet he does meet their request: little that is out of the ordinary happens in the book, and yet the narrative is compelling as Emma Bovary pursues a downward spiral of vanity and delusion. I don’t tend to read this kind of fiction, preferring Bildungsromanic stories of self-actualization to stories of the fall, but as a story of the costs of obsession with material comforts and status, a Stoic would struggle to do better.

David Suzuki

Not a book review today, I’m afraid – a talk review instead!

I happened to attend a talk by David Suzuki this morning, the Canadian academic, media personality, and environmental activitist. He’s a strong proponent of environmental sustainability and preserving our forests, waters, and other natural resources, instead of exploiting them into oblivion. To achieve this, he’s currently launching an attempt to change the Canadian constitution to guarantee access to a healthy environment, as is true in 110 other countries, as well as unite with other groups to change the Canadian culture more generally.

I’m very sympathetic to his aims: we need to do a far better job protecting the environment than we currently do, and let me say I enjoyed his talk generally: he’s very funny and makes some good poings. What I found striking, though, was that I just don’t believe his solutions will work. Constitutional change in Canada is a morass of unpleasantness, evoking as it does divisions over language and culture, and past attempts to change it in any way have failed: no matter how popular his suggestions might be, opening up a constitutional reform will lead to a huge argument with no consensus likely.

More generally, though, I think he falls into a common error in environmentalist thinking. To me, environmentalism actually makes more sense as a right wing issue than a left wing: ideals of conservation and Christian stewardship have a long history on the right. The left, however, having decided the right is evil, simply dismiss them out of hand, and in so doing lose the opportunity to find allies that could really make a difference. This morning, a young guy identified himself as Christian, and asked how Suzuki’s arguments could motivate Christians to save the environment. Rather than engage, Suzuki insulted Christianity and shut him down, managing to change what was a supporter into an annoyed and defensive critic. Christianity and the environmentalist movement surely have their differences, perhaps particularly over science, but dismissing others motivations to achieve your goals seems narrow-minded at best. Even business has more in common with the environmentalist movement than the environmentalist movement seems to recognize: what environmentalists call sustainability business calls preservation of capital, and both see them as the highest possible good. I’m always amazed they can’t seem to see that in each other.

I think it’s true of a lot of our causes in general: we identify with a side, and so we fail to reach out to others who, though on opposite ‘sides’, might easily agree with us on a given issue. The far left and the far right have a lot in common on issues of government intervention, environmental activism, and even decentralization of power, but they’re so busy hating each other they never get anything done. It seems a shame.

Moby Dick Quotes

For the full review of Moby-Dick, look here. Having highlighted its strength as the well-turned phrase though, it only seemed fair to share a few. Have fun!

On Human Nature

“The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, – what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills…”

“When a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.”

“The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed g radations, and at the last one pause:- through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trade the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.”

On the Ocean

“Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one”

“The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders.”

On Meaning in Life

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”

“Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

“If we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

“Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at least came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…”

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

Whaling is an activity that has persisted since prehistoric times, peaking in the 1800s with the harvesting of oil from sperm whales, with their population falling from over a million before commercial sperm whaling to less than a third of that by the time whaling was banned by a moratorium in 1982. In 1842, however, a young man would abandon the whaling ship he was working on to live among reputed cannibals and pursue love affairs with local girls. He would recount these events in bestselling books when he returned home, before destroying his career with a book that received almost universally scathing reviews: Moby-Dick, now listed among the Great American Novels, even called the best book ever written.

At its best, Moby-Dick is excellent: it’s moving, it’s insightful, and it very much captures the sense of the sacred, the spiritual relationship of crew to whale or man to obsession. It can also be fascinating in its detail: entire chapters are devoted to the anatomy of the whale, the symbolism of the colour white, or the role of the whale in art and history. Phrases like “Call me Ishmael” are some of the best known of any book, even among people who haven’t read the original source: it is but one of many unforgettable phrases. Though broadly pro-whaling, it also even has some sympathy with the whales, confronting the fact that the activity necessarily involves tormenting the animals.

For all that, let me confess I found it a little boring, philistine as that may make me. I’m not one to quail at historical detail given my passion for history, and those parts I enjoyed, but particularly the first half I found slow, long descriptive sections filling space between more interesting parts. The book has some great sections and some great lines, but I wouldn’t have minded were it considerably shorter. Still, as a reflection on the personality of man and the necessities of the energy industry, it has much to tell us today: the oil we burn, though not literally in lamps and candles, can still cost blood.

Moral Clarity: a guide for grown-up idealists – Susan Neiman

“If you’re committed to the Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” – Neiman

“Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we look upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” – Kant

Consider a man who cannot resist temptation: every time he passes a brothel, for example, he succumbs, risking his marriage, his dignity, and his health. What if that man knew he would be hanged if he entered? We all conclude he would resist: the desire for life is a preeminent human motivation, and all else pales before it, no matter how tempting.

What if, however, an unjust ruler seeks to kill someone, and orders the man to give false testimony to condemn the other to death? If the man refuses, he will himself be put to death. Now we hesitate: we aren’t sure what the man would do, or indeed what we would do in those circumstances. Kant (from whom the thought experiment is taken), says this shows there are limits to knowledge; it is difficult to know in advance what we would do. Many would agree we should refuse to testify, and we all agree we could: we are simply not sure if we will. There, Kant argues, lies freedom: it is not pleasure but justice that can move humans to overcome the love of life itself.

Moral Clarity is an attempt to understand the foundations of reason and idealism in the Enlightenment, and to use those ideas to clarify our own often muddy conceptions of politics and morality. The 18th century left, she points out, believed in universal ideals to which reality should be compared (Kant, Rousseau): the right believed that such ideals were dangerous and deceptive, and gained value only from their similarity to reality (Hume, Burke). From modern terrorism to traditional religion, she uses Enlightenment ideas to help understand the modern world, and argues that the Enlightenment belief in the power of ideas is an essential tool for progressive movements everywhere.

Neiman is an expert on Kant, and her philosophy is excellent; clear and insightful, she quotes widely and deeply and is extremely impressive. Unfortunately, at least for me her applications to policy are far weaker: it reads as a series of jabs at Republicans with no particularly new insights or understandings to provide. If you can get to the meat of the book, however, it provides a clear and compelling argument for morality and ideals in the public sphere, concepts that we are today too often uncomfortable or even unfamiliar with.

Fire and Ashes – Michael Ignatieff

“I want to explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.”

Michael Ignatieff is an extremely distinguished academic internationally, having held positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. He’s won a variety of prizes for his books, including short listing for the Booker prize as well as a variety of non-fiction and academic texts, and also worked as a television and radio broadcaster in the UK. He is also a rather dismal politician.

Fire and Ashes is the story of how Ignatieff took over the leadership of the Canadian Liberal party, traditionally the most powerful party in Canadian politics, and led it to its worst result in history, even losing his own seat. Of course, the vagaries of party politics are hardly attributable to the leader alone, but it suffers in comparison to his professional success elsewhere. Ignatieff attempts to use that experience to draw lessons for those who might come after him, with mixed results.

The book does capture why he struggled as a politician, though perhaps not how he meant it to. Comparing it to Bill Clinton’s autobiography, for example, you can see the difference between someone who thinks deeply about politics, and someone who actually lives as a politician. Ignatieff comes across as wise about politics as an observer, not as a participant.

Ironically, though that may have made him a worse politician, it makes it a better book: one can appreciate his observations without attempting to disentangle political motivations. Perhaps that’s why much good political commentary is written by unsuccessful politicians. A book length reflection on a personal failure is no easy task, however: Ignatieff’s is a mix of astute observations about politics, somewhat bitter discussions of why he didn’t do well that are not as incisive as they needed to be, and some revealing confessions, as when he argues power matters above conscience because without power you can’t do anything (a section I found rather depressing, since if you sacrifice conscience to win power, I’d rather you didn’t). Ignatieff is a smart, analytical man who isn’t meant to be a politician, and his book captures that, both in what he recognizes and what he doesn’t about his performance.

The Lays of Ancient Rome – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible…A man who can invent or embellish an interesting story, and put it into a form which others may easily retain in their recollection, will always be highly esteemed by a people eager for amusement and information, but destitute of libraries.”

The Lays of Ancient Rome are a collection of narrative poems, written as if they date from early Roman history. Macaulay’s intention was to recreate the feel of ballads the Romans might themselves have listened to, but are now lost. More recently, Winston Churchill memorized them in their entirety while at school to show that, despite his weak academic performance, he at least had an excellent memory.

The poems are a mix of martial, tragic, and spiritual themes, and are each prefaced with a discussion of the legend that inspired them. As with more modern folk tales, however, he also tries to capture themes of inequality and justice that would colour the telling of history in Roman times. For that reason, they still feel clever, as a poem written for the inventors of satire deserves.

On War

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods.’”

On increasing inequality

“Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the High,
and the Fathers grind the low.”

On Poverty

“Lest, when our latest hope is fled, ye taste of our despair,
And learn by proof, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.”

Flashboys – Michael Lewis

“The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.”

In 2009, a 300 million dollar secret fiber optic line was built, so secret that workers were kept in small groups and prevented from meeting, so secret they were never told the purpose of the line or where it was going, so secret they were asked to report anyone asking questions or digging near the line. Many thought they were on a top secret government project. In truth, they were building a line from New Jersey to Chicago that would shave 1.5 milliseconds off the time data takes to flow between the two points, bringing it down to 13 milliseconds, a privilege for which banks and traders were asked to pay as much as 10 million dollars apiece. It takes, by the way, 100 milliseconds to blink your eyes.

Michael Lewis is one of my favourite financial authors: I think his coverage of the financial crisis in The Big Short was masterful, quite possibly the best book on the subject, and he’s also well known for Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. He uses individual stories to explain complex issues, and in Flashboys, he describes the new world of stock markets, a world in which the markets are black boxes in high security buildings in New Jersey and Chicago, and it’s worth millions of dollars to have your computer two feet closer to that box. Every inch counts when signals only go at 186,000 miles per second. It’s also a world with predators and prey, and Lewis is sharply critical of many of the predators, especially dark pools and high frequency traders, those who trade in a millisecond time frame.

The book has been controversial: in essence, one side argues that though high frequency trading is not implicitly bad, many of the strategies used are essentially robbery: they gather more information than others and then use their advantage to take money that would otherwise have gone to the investor. On the other side, as an ex-Goldman Sachs employee I spoke with a few days ago argued, supporters suggest that such traders play the same role traders have always played, helping bring together sellers and buyers and adding liquidity to the market. Where Lewis is weakest, in justice, is that as with any story he needs a villain, and high frequency takes the role. In truth, however, many of the problems are systematic, and a systemic change is needed, as indeed one of the protagonists attempts to do by setting up his own, fair, stock exchange.

I personally tend to find the mugging side of things more apt, but that’s up the reader. Regardless of what you decide, I can recommend Flashboys as a phenomenal way to understand the modern stock market. Lewis has made a subject few of us understand clear and entertaining, and for anyone interested in flash crashes, hedge funds, algorithmic trading, or just the financial world in general, it’s essential reading. It’s a book on finance that sold 130,000 copies in its first week, is already being turned into a film, and has spawned thousands of articles, interviews, and responses. I highly recommend it.

You can get a copy here, or just read the Amazon reviews.