Category Archives: Book Review

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character – Paul Tough

The classic study on self-control is the marshmallow experiment, conducted by Walter Mischel. Children were asked to resist eating a single marshmallow, and if they managed it they would be rewarded with two marshmallows later on. The most successful students would sit on their hands, sing, or otherwise distract themselves. One young overachiever even took a nap! Later in life, the children who could resist the marshmallow best did better on almost every measure of life outcomes. (Interestingly, one measure they didn’t do better on was avoiding problem drinking: alcoholism did not appear to correlate with lack of willpower).

How Children Succeed follows on from this work and examines the importance of character (things like self-control, optimism, and grit), not just intelligence, in adult outcomes. Tough points out that measures of character are as good at predicting success in later life as measures of intelligence, and that measures of intelligence can be disturbingly flawed: one study found that offering M&Ms for each correct answer increased IQ scores by 12 points for kids at the bottom of the distribution.

One of the most fascinating chapters, though, is on stress. On the savannah, when we see a lion every possible system activates in order to get us out of trouble: we breathe faster, we have more white blood cells, our muscles tense, etc. This response is essential for survival, but wears our body out over time. He argues the same happens today when people have stressful childhoods: their systems become overloaded and wear out, and they find it difficult to regulate thoughts and emotions later in life. If we measure stress levels as children and control for them, the effect of poverty on adult outcomes almost disappears.

Perhaps even more interestingly, evidence from rats suggests the opposite of some suggested parenting styles: the rats with nurturing and attentive mothers while they are young become more independent and self-reliant when they are older.

The evidence is clear that character is extremely important to outcomes, and it’s not clear our modern society accounts for that. Policy interventions are therefore critical. Stress reduction among children can contribute to measures meant to tackle poverty, and ensuring that students rate themselves on non-cognitive measures can go a long way to encouraging the right behaviour, as some charter schools that offer a character report card have discovered. Intelligence is not enough, as many an intelligent adult can tell you.

You can keep reading How Children Succeed here (or in the UK or Canada) – for those interested in education, I’d highly recommend it. Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right, and we can try to build our characters together.

From Democrats to Kings – Michael Scott

“From Democrats to Kings is a story not just of Athens at the height of its power and Alexander at his, but of the turbulent times of transition in between these two powerful extremes.”

Is the European Union better off as a united whole or individual nations? Would the US be better off if it had a stronger president, one that could break congressional deadlocks? Countries today are immersed in arguments over the benefits of centralized or decentralized power.

As Michael Scott dryly points out, however, the past is just like now, only earlier. In From Democrats to Kings, he covers a relatively understudied period of Greek history: the period of transition between what we often see at the height of Athenian democracy, the 500s, and when it was taken over by Philip and Alexander the Great, often seen as the end of their democracy.

The book is perhaps slightly easier to read if you already know about the periods immediately before and after its setting, but it’s fun either way. Over a single generation, Athens goes from a democracy to a dictatorship, and Greece goes from a collection of warring cities to a unified whole, one that would eventually be a part of the enormous land empire of Alexander the great. For that generation, Athens would be wracked with indecision between divisive democracy and dictatorial unity, even putting Socrates on trial for supporting dictatorships.

Today, we often see Alexander as the death of Greek democracy (partly due to Athenian propaganda), but Scott points out that Athens actually benefited enormously during his reign. Their GDP doubled, huge public investment was begun in religious sanctuaries, stadiums, theatres, and public works, statues stolen 150 years previous by the Persians were returned by Alexander, and Athens entered the longest period of prosperity it had enjoyed in a century. Unification, even under a dictator, was not all bad for Athens, nor for Greece, though it came at the cost of liberty.

The period is an interesting one, and the book is even more so. As well as a professor at Cambridge, Scott is a presenter of BBC documentaries, and that style comes through in the book with his eagerness to share tidbits of knowledge as well as explain his larger theme. I will guiltily admit I have a passion for classical history anyway, but even if you don’t the book is interesting, providing a clear understanding of events and carefully putting it into modern context. Though few democracies today are faced with a choice between democrats and kings, the optimal level of centralization remains an interesting, and contentious, issue.

Want more? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

“Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

Why do you eat what you do? How was it produced? If you can answer with more than the aisle of the supermarket you bought it from, well done. If you can’t, does that worry you? Is all food created equal and of equal health benefit? Is beef from a grass-lot the same as feed-lot, or vegetables grown industrially the same as organic? Do you know the answer to that? If not, does that worry you?

Michael Pollan argues it should worry us. Three principle chains of food sustain us, all of them linking one biological system, ourselves, with another, a patch of soil. Most of us, however, remain woefully ignorant of any sort of understanding of our food systems. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explores each of the three methods of food creation, industrial, organic, and hunter/gatherer, and examines the costs and benefits of each.

There are a lot of shocking facts in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but to highlight one, I hadn’t realized that in industrial production of beef, cattle are dosed with antibiotics as a preventative measure, since they are so susceptible to disease from the poor conditions in which they live. Antibiotic resistance may be one of the most serious problems humanity as a whole faces in the coming years; to squander our antibiotics in a manner almost designed to create resistance is for me simply unacceptable. Shaving pennies off the price of beef just doesn’t seem worth the cost of our ability to fight disease. Health warning: readers of sensitive stomach may find they learn rather more about how broiler chickens are raised than they might have wanted.

There are of course two sides to every story, and Pollan is careful to examine the benefits from cheaper food in terms of health and living standards. He’s right, and the animal rights movement sometimes unfairly ignores these benefits. The reality though is that most of us aren’t in a position to decide either way; we remain willfully blind to the reality, ignorant of what we eat and where it comes from. Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, but we should at least be aware of the processes our food goes through, whether that means glass walls on slaughterhouses or increased education about industrial production. In the end, what you eat is a personal choice, but it’s one that should be made out of information, not ignorance.

If you want to learn more about what you’re eating, you can get Pollan’s book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Fixing Social Capital: Bowling Alone 2

“We remain, in short, reasonably well-informed spectators of public affairs, but many fewer of us actually partake in the game.”

Feeling a bit sick? Moving to a high social capital state may be as good for your health as quitting smoking. Most of us think of the benefits of social capital as coordinating the group to solve collective action problems and reinforcing democracy. More subtly, however, it also brings psychological benefits, encouraging tolerance and empathy and reducing stress, depression, and illness. Social capital smooths the path of modern society. Though we may not require saints for society to operate, we do require a minimum willingness to serve the group and resist taking advantage of everyone else.

As we have seen in the first half of the review of Bowling Alone, social capital has fallen dramatically in the United States, in terms of poker games, picnics, community societies and pretty much all other civic activities. Putnam turns to why this is a problem and how it can be resolved.

Putnam compares our age to the Gilded Age, in the early 1900s, with inequalities in wealth, class, and race exacerbated by concerns over the fracturing of communities and the centralization of corporate power. The question then and now was how to “reform institutions and adapt our habits in this new world to secure the enduring values of tradition,” and the Gilded Age preceded an enormous surge in social capital. The loss of social capital is not inevitable, and it can be reversed.

To rebuild social capital we require both supply and demand for communities. We must create a supply of civic activities by establishing clubs, societies, and groups that allow individuals to interact with each other, while also creating demand for such activities through education and other means. In other words, we require both individual change and institutional change.

Bowling Alone covers a fundamental idea, and does so exhaustively. At times, this can be a bit much: he would make a claim, I would agree, and then thirty pages of supporting statistics followed regardless. It can also feel a bit dated; though published in 2000, it is his bad luck that the leaps and bounds in technology since then mean his discussion of the internet and mobility feel the need for an update. For someone seeking insight into communities, however, the book is a must read, both because you will see it cited in any modern work on a related subject, and because it introduces ideas that remain a major concern today, and deals with them thoroughly.

You can read Bowling Alone here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right and do your part to restore social capital!

The Slow Fix – Carl Honoré

“The time has come to resist the siren call of half-baked solutions and short-term palliatives and start fixing things properly. We need to find a new and better way to tackle every kind of problem. We need to learn the art of the Slow Fix.”

Imagine a prisoner trapped inside a tower, with a rope half the length needed to reach the ground. Undeterred, the prisoner cuts the rope in half, ties the halves together, and escapes. When told to imagine themselves as the prisoner, 48% of people figure out how they did it. When told to imagine the prisoner is someone else, 66% solve the problem. How we frame the problem, and how we think about it, matters (the solution is at the end).

Carl Honoré worries that this captures a larger problem: that we have fallen victim to a culture of quick fixes. Both psychologically and societally, he argues that we turn almost immediately for the obvious solution, and end up curing not the cause, but the symptoms, of a problem. Of course, some problems can and should be cured with a quick fix: but for problems like global warming, financial crises, obesity, and others, we need to spend time understanding the problem before we can solve it.

To help, he offers a series of 12 steps problem-solvers should go through, including collaboration, devolving authority, going over the details, and others. The core of his book, however, lies in his examples. The rehabilitation-oriented prisons of Norway, the exclusively student-run conflict resolution systems of the elementary schools of Finland, locally produced coffee from farms of Costa Rica and the online chore game-ification of ChoreWars all provide grist for his mill as he puts smart solutions to difficult problems under the microscope.

As befits a book focused on slow, however, and as he himself points out, he has no easy solutions to problems or simple lessons. Difficult problems take time and care, and shortcuts are not always an option. A good start, however, is ignoring 24 hour news cycles and voters who prefer instant decisions over correct decisions. The prisoner, by the way, splits the rope lengthwise – Honoré will be disappointed if you have skipped to the end to read the solution instead of slowly digesting the material in the middle.

Feel in need of a slow fix yourself? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Decline in Social Capital: Bowling Alone 1

“The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.”

Today we’ll start with the evidence for and causes of a decline in social capital in the U.S. – next week (link here) we’ll focus on the value of social capital and potential cures.

On April 30^th, 1999, the Charity League of Dallas met for the final time. They had met every Friday for 57 years, but by 1999, the average age of the members had increased to 80 and their last new member had joined two years earlier. As old members had passed, new members had not joined, despite increases in population. The same pattern is repeated across the country. Why? And does it matter? These are the questions Putnam seeks to answer. Bowling Alone is the classic work on social capital, and as such is frequently referred to elsewhere, both in sociology and more broadly.

Putnam believes that in the last forty years, America has undergone a dramatic fall in social capital. Social capital, he explains, is the networks and connections that unite us to others, smoothing our progress through life and adding value to our lives. Today, however, Americans no longer join as many clubs, volunteer as many hours, run as often for office, vote, play sports together, or eat together, and generally involve themselves less in civic affairs or their communities. At best, they are members of mailing list based organizations, watching from the sidelines as their organization lobbies Congress rather than being themselves involved.

Social change generally occurs as a result of a combination of two factors, changes in individual decisions and generational shifts. Putnam notes however that seniors remain as involved in the community as they were when younger. Instead, generational change has occurred; young people today are far less involved in the community than their forebears. Why? He lists four causes, and estimates their percentage of the total impact.

The changing nature of households (10%). The entry of women into the workforce and the increase in full time as opposed to part time work.
Urban sprawl (10%). Sprawl leads to an increase in commuting and the fracturing of communities.
Electronic media, particularly TV (25%). TV takes up time and drains energy, so that people who watch TV do far fewer other activities even after controlling for the time taken.
Generational change (50%). Intense community bonds were formed by generations who experienced the war, in contrast to late generations like baby boomers and others who did not have that formative communal experience.

Next week, we’ll discuss the benefits to social capital as well as Putnam’s suggestions for rebuilding or communal bonds.

In the meantime, if you want to read it for yourself, you can find Bowling Alone here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Public Intellectual in Canada – Nelson Wiseman

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

Something of a specialist post this week, and not everyone is interested in the state of public intellectuals in Canada, I realize. But, I think it’s interesting, and I get to pick. So there.

According to the philosopher Julien Benda, because intellectuals existed, “humanity did evil for 2000 years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” A fairly intellectual way to look at it, of course, and it reflects an irony in asking public intellectuals to contribute to a collection of essays about public intellectuals. How public intellectuals see themselves and each other does not exactly capture all possible viewpoints.

The Public Intellectual in Canada is a collection of essays on, as can be guessed from the title, the role of the public intellectual in Canada, whether as public policy wonk, media don, professional pundit, or perhaps simply as thorn in the side of power. Canadian thought and thought-leaders can sometimes feel a bit overshadowed by our much larger neighbour to the South, a fact reflected by several essays, as is our somewhat unique cultural divide into English and French Canada. In other ways, however, our public intellectuals struggle with much the same issues as anyone else, and insight into the need for public opinion polls as a way for individuals to learn about themselves in the context of society, the history of public thought, the changing nature of universities and their expectations of academics, and perhaps most of all the role of slow deliberation to mediate the deluge of information from a 24 hour news cycle, is welcome – and applicable – anywhere.

Many of the essays are Canadian centric, and I suspect would have little interest beyond Canadians. One, for example, focuses on the history of Le Devoir, a Québécois publication, while another discusses the benefits of a larger population for Canada. Others have broader appeal; some individuals discuss their own experiences as public intellectuals, while others reflect on the role of an intellectual more broadly. Most of all, however, Wiseman has assembled a selection of essays both left and right, data-driven and qualitative, on how knowledge is constructed and ideas disseminated, and for someone interested in Canada, it is a great read.

Want more? Get the Public Intellectual in Canada from the U of T publisher. Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right for regular updates! Disclosure: I read The Public Intellectual in Canada as a free advance reader copy.

The Price of Everything – Eduardo Porter

A little bit late this week – my apologies! Life sometimes gets in the way of the internet, I find.

“Market-transactions do not necessarily provide people with what they want; they provide people with what they think they want… [Prices] provide a road map of people’s psychological quirks, of their fears, their unacknowledged constraints.”

What do religion, happiness, healthcare, women’s rights, culture, and gifts all have in common? For good or for ill, says Eduardo Porter, they all involve prices. In The Price of Everything he covers how these issues and more are affected by the price system, and how people directly and indirectly put prices on everything that we interact with.

The standard criticism of this perspective goes back Oscar Wilde, of course: that people know “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Porter argues that this can actually be a strength: prices may have little to do with what is good for people, but they can tell us what they believe or what they are willing to pay for. Many of our everyday values can be captured by the implicit prices we assign them, and even when prices are inefficient or incorrect, they still tell us what the people involved in the transaction believe.

An iphone app entitled “I am Rich” (now taken down) did nothing but flash a red gem on the screen, and retailed for $999, providing a price on status. Organs in Iran go for $1,200. Monogamy, he argues, spread largely as a result of an increased price on social cohesion, while animal rights movements are more common in the developed world because humane actions cost more in developing countries. All of these prices may be interesting, but unfortunately though his arguments have some merit, they feel incomplete. Few of us would agree, for example, that the Protestant Reformation occurred because the Catholic Church wasn’t giving good value for money.

Porter’s knowledge is broad, and unfortunately as a result the book can feel like a literature review that brushes over the material instead of providing insight. A chapter per subject, when the subjects are as vast as happiness, culture, and religion, means the book sometimes reads like a list of facts. I would enjoy a chapter here and a chapter there, but reading it cover to cover can be a a bit dry. In the end, though I enjoyed the brief anecdotes, I would have preferred a book that engaged with the material, rather than listed it. That said, though I can’t tell you the price of everything, I can admit I only paid £2 for the book.

Want more about the price of religion? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

The Clock of the Long Now – Stewart Brand

“How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?”

Stewart Brand is a worried man. Earthquakes, war, murder, the burning of libraries; bad things happen fast, he argues. Good things, in contrast, like reforestation, the growth of a child, the maturing of an adult, or the building of library, happen slow. Today’s world though happens on a faster and faster time scale – our “now” is a smaller and smaller increment of time. How, he wonders, can we make our society see the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week? How, in other words, can we give ourselves a long now?

The Clock of the Long Now is a collection of essays by Brand about this topic. Brand is an ecologist and environmental activist, including running the Whole Earth Catalog and being instrumental in having NASA release the first picture of Earth as seen from space, believing it could symbolize our shared destinies. Today, he is a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, devoted to the issues The Clock of the Long Now raises.

For our world to survive, he argues, we must think and compete on 6 different time scales. Over the scale of years, individuals compete; over decades, families; over centuries, tribes or nations; over millennia, culture; over tens of millennia, species; and over eons, the whole web of life on our planet. Thinking on these scales means we can identify and work to preserve what really matters.

Unfortunately, as he points out, “the great problem with the future is that we die there.” It can be difficult to mentally immanentize the future. To help, he has a number of suggestions, including writing dates in five digits (02013, not 2013), increasing history education among all professions, and following James Lovelock’s proposal of writing a start-up manual for civilization, from making fire through ancient genetic design to modern biotech.

As with any collection of essays, any given reader will like some essays and dislike others. Overall, however, this book, and Brand’s foundation, form a powerful message. We can still read Galileo’s technical correspondence from the 1590s, but not the correspondence that launched AI research in the 1960s, because the electronic storage has decayed. What does that say about what we’re leaving to future generations? I’m not sure Brand knows the answer, and I certainly don’t, but the question is one that is too often lost in the babble of the present.

Want more illumination? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Prosperity Without Growth – Tim Jackson

“We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.” – Ben Okri

Prosperity Without Growth tackles an intuitively fascinating subject. Economists and politicians tend to assume that the key goal of policy is to create perpetual economic growth. There is, however, a finite amount of resources on Earth, whether oil, steel, or even volume of sunlight. Are these two facts compatible?

Unfortunately, despite my interest in its subject, I didn’t find Prosperity Without Growth compelling. The first two thirds seemed to add little to the discussion, while frustratingly the final third introduced ideas and frameworks that could well have made for an interesting book had they been discussed earlier. The book’s audience also seems unclear: he goes from introducing macroeconomic equations, likely appealing only to economists, to explaining very basic economics of little interest to the same.

In that final third, Jackson points out that to reconcile growth and limits, one of two things must happen. Either we must have sustainable growth, in which the economy grows but doesn’t require more energy inputs, as for example when we move employment to low-carbon jobs, or we must have a sustainable no-growth economy, as when productivity increases but we work less hours to compensate. To do either, he says, we must establish limits, fix our economic system, and change our social logic.

Perhaps the most interesting piece I have read on this subject is a discussion between an economist and a physicist, available here. It introduces ideas that had never occurred to me, like a planetary heat death from waste heat, and though I’m not sure I agree when we discuss that scale of issue that ruling out space travel is fair (you’ll have to read the link for yourself), I found the whole thing fascinating. I’m not sure I can say the same about Prosperity Without Growth. Still, it’s a book that tackles a critical issue of broad interest to many, and for that alone it deserves some credit. It does also manage some nuance and depth at the end – I just regret it didn’t manage it earlier.

Keep reading here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, get more illumination by joining the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!