Tag Archives: Politics

The Restoration of Rome (Theoderic) – Peter Heather

Rather than review Peter Heather’s The Restoration of Rome directly, I’m doing to try something a little different; I’m going to summarize the lives of three major leaders, Theoderic, Justinian, and Charlemagne, who attempted to recreate the Western Roman Empire. Roman history is good for the soul! For those interested in the book as a whole, I’m not wild about Peter Heather as an author (he’s a little too certain of his opinions for me), but the book is one of his better efforts, except for the final section on the Catholic Church as a new Roman Empire, which I found neither convincing nor particularly insightful.

Anyway, on to Theoderic. Born in 454 AD, he spent 10 years of his youth in Constantinople (modern Istanbul, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire) as a hostage for the good behaviour of his father, a Goth leader, in return for which his father was sent 300 pounds of gold each year. Durin this time, the Western Roman Empire would fall, breaking apart into independent regions controlled by various Germanic, Goth, or Vandal groups. The Eastern Roman Empire would continue, but the loss of the West was painful.

After Theoderic’s father’s death, he would take his troops towards Constantinople, exploiting his insider knowledge, and wander around demanding bribes and payments. Constantinople, in the meantime, would attempt to get him to fight another large group of Goths in the same area, hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

All the political manoeuvering came to nought, however, by one of the coincidences that makes history interesting. The other leader of the Goths (also named Theoderic; it meant King of the People in Gothic, so it was a popular name) attempting to mount his horse, fell onto a spear and died. Lacking a clear heir, the other Goths joined up with our Theoderic, and suddenly he was a force to be reckoned with, to Constantinople’s dismay.

After some quick thinking by Constantinople, the two sides agreed that Theoderic would go to capture Italy, thereby getting rid of him. He promptly did so, defeating the leader of Italy, agreeing to share power with him, and then ten days later at a feast running at him with a sword and killing him. Mission accomplished. Once he was in power, however, Theoderic didn’t stop. For the next 33 years, he would conquer and ally with various states until he controlled Italy, Spain, Southern France, the Dalmatian Coast, and indirectly North Africa. He was seen as a wise ruler and the spiritual heir to the Roman Empire, and the Roman nobility in Italy hailed him as such. It may seem strange to modern eyes that Italian Romans would so quickly accept a Goth leader as emperor, but at the time it seemed natural: many Roman emperors had come from distant parts of the Empire, and the promise of restoration to their former glory was a powerful incentive.

After his death, though, it all fell apart. Without him, Goth unity could not be maintained and so their control of other lands also disappeared. Only a few years later, therefore, another attempt would be made to restore Western Rome, this time by the new Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian. We’ll discuss him next!

Zero-Sum World – Gideon Rachman

“It is the argument of this book that the international political system has indeed entered a period of dangerous instability and profound change.” – Rachman

Gideon Rachman, a journalist with the FT who spent 15 years at The Economist, has considerable experience talking about politics and international relations. His book focuses on the last 30 years, and divides it into three distinct eras: an Age of Transformation, an Age of Optimism, and an Age of Anxiety. Most of this post will be a summary of that structure; I found it a nice way to think about recent political history.

From 1978 to 1990, under Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher, and Reagan, Rachman argues that in an effort to revive economies world leaders transformed the structure of international trade, loosening controls (to varying degrees) and encouraging globalization. China would begin to join the world economy; the USSR would disintegrate; and free markets would reign in the UK and US.

1990 to 2008 Rachman labels as the Age of Optimism. Trade and globalization flourish, with Clinton as a classic case. American power, whether military, economic, financial, technological, or intellectual, reigned supreme, and with the collapse of the USSR the world looked forward to peace and prosperity. No longer was competition between nations relevant: the success of any nation helped everyone, and the real threat to international security was not rivalries between powers, but failed states. International relations were win-win.

By 2008, however, the limits of American military power had been made painfully clear, and the financial crisis would do the same to American economic power. Global political problems, like terrorism and climate change would emerge, but the world seemed incapable of coordinating global political solutions. Authoritarian countries like Russia and China would gain power and confidence, and though no broad challenge to democracy would emerge, the rise of authoritarian powers spread like a rot through the system. No longer were disputes win-win; instead, they were zero-sum, with one country losing if the other won.

Such is Rachman’s story, and if somewhat politics and developed-world centric, it is compelling. Today’s discussion tends to be left vs. right, but for much of history it was authoritarian vs. democracy, and that’s the axis Rachman wants to focus on. He argues that in the long run authoritarian powers will struggle due to an inability to project power globally and a lack of a convincing alternative vision of how the world should be run, but in the short run, they can pose a significant problem.

I had a good time reading the book: each chapter is devoted to key events in recent history, and though I had a passing knowledge of most of them, having them detailed in a clear, structured manner was useful, and Rachman’s occasional dry observation didn’t hurt. No particularly revolutionary new ideas, perhaps, but it’s well explained and nicely expressed. A light but interesting read.

The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The Signal and the Noise got a lot of hype when it was released, partly because Nate Silver correctly predicted 49 of the 50 states in the American presidential election, again. The book itself is wide-ranging, covering not just politics but financial crises, baseball, the weather, economics, flu, chess, poker, global warming, and a host of other issues. In all of them, Silver examines the state of the industry in terms of its use of data and its ability to predict the future. His broadest lesson, though, is that the modern world is flooded with data, almost overwhelmed with it. As he correctly points out:

“The number of meaningful relationships in the data – those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world works – is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.”

At the core, his solution is humility about what we can predict and what we can understand about the world, no matter how much data we have. More formally, he argues for Bayesian thinking – when we make a prediction, he suggests, it should never be a single value, but instead a probability weighting of various outcomes. It is not possible, he argues, to make predictions with data abstracted from context: we must understand how the data works, not just observe it, as stock market quants might argue.

Statistics is not exactly a mass-market topic, and Silver has done an admirable job making his book accessible to the general public. I flipped through the chapter on baseball, but I imagine other readers might well do the same to the chapter on economic forecasting: to each their own. Generally, however, his examples are great fun, whether on how people predict (or don’t) earthquakes, how poker players calculate opponents hands, or the development of chaos theory by Lorenz as he sought to predict the weather. He is also a dab hand at phrasing, and there are almost too many good lines to pick one to quote. Even if you don’t directly work with data, your life is affected by it in a myriad of ways, and it’s worth understanding the limitations of our knowledge.

The Price of Civilization – Jeffrey Sachs

“In our crowded and unstable world of 7 billion people, we need to dial down the propaganda and relentless shrieking of the mass media and reconnect with more basic human values. We need…to refocus our attention as individuals, consumers, and virtuous citizens, to what is most important in bringing us economic fulfillment and well-being.”

Disclosure first: I find Jeffrey Sachs somewhat frustrating. To my mind, his Millennium Villages project is an embarrassment – there’s no shame in starting a project that doesn’t work, but to refuse to release data to try to prevent others from finding out and continuing to support it damages the entire development movement (See Freakonomics blog, Wikipedia, etc.). It perhaps makes me unfairly cynical when he calls for government transparency and reform, so keep that in mind.

With that preamble, I found his book disappointing. I picked it up because the thesis sounded great, that the cause of America’s woes was a moral failure in its elites. I think this is an underdiscussed topic: the change in moral norms over the past 50 years means what once would be socially unacceptable, such as accepting an enormous salary and spending it entirely consumption, is now routine. In Ancient Rome, the wealthy were expected to spend most of their fortunes on public works, and did so because that was the norm. In some ways I like that model of the world: I think contributing to our communities is enormously important. I don’t know how to get there from here though: increasing taxes coerces contributions, which may be useful but is I think different from people wanting to contribute on their own. Anyway, despite Sach’s thesis statement, that’s not what the book is about.

The book focuses on ideas Sachs has introduced before. If this is your introduction to the subject, this or his earlier books are useful: he’s left wing but not partisan, believing both democrats and republicans are terrible. If you’ve spent a while thinking about the issues or read his other books though, there’s not much new here. He lists the classic problems facing the US, economic, political, social, and psychological, and then possible solutions, with a focus on increased taxes on the wealthy and mindfulness by citizens, and people engaging with the process. He has some suggestions I really enjoy, like requiring the US President to spend a few minutes every State of the Union outlining how the policies he’s mentioned will affect Americans 50 years from now, but most feel well-worn.

He ends with the idea that it will all sort itself out because the Millennial generation is socially liberal (in the American sense) and ethnically diverse. He may well be right in that, and he’s certainly right on some of the other issues, but I’m not sure I got much out of the book. It all felt just a bit too standard for my taste.

The Art of War – Sun Tzu

Having reviewed Good Strategy, Bad Strategy earlier, I thought it might be worth posting some quotes from Sun Tzu’s Art of War to provide some balance – there’s nothing like going back to the classics, after all.

Deception

“All warfare is based on deception.”

“Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, then crush him.”

Leadership

“Confront your soldiers with the deed itself; never let them know your design. When the outlook is bright, bring it before their eyes; but tell them nothing when the situation is gloomy.”

“At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him. He carries his men deep into hostile territory before he shows his hand.”

Victory

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

“The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.”

“Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength, from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us.”

“In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.”

“In raiding and plundering be like fire, in immovability like a mountain.”

Want more? Get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the email list to your right for more subtle illumination…

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – Richard Rumelt

“The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

John Kay (the British economist, not the guy who invented the flying shuttle) recently came out with his five book recommendations on economics in the real world. Since I hadn’t read it, I thought I’d pick up Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

Overall, I’m impressed. Rumelt is an academic who studies strategy, and his clarity and insight does him credit. All he wants is structured thinking, and his book reads like a how-to tutorial: though he usually applies it in the context of business or national defense, it could equally relate to strategy in almost any field. CEOs often read things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and this book comes as close as any I’ve read to making that seem reasonable.

Rumelt is worried that much of what is done today is bad strategy, for which he has a specific definition. Bad strategy correlates with fluff, a failure to face core challenges, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives. Too many businesses, he points out, have a strategy of having 20% growth in sales for the next 5 years. That’s not a strategy – it’s at best a goal, and quite possibly wishful thinking.

Strategies are made up of three things. First, diagnose the problem. Second, come up with a guiding policy. And third, derive a set of coherent actions that allow you to implement that guiding policy. Too many organizations neglect the first and third steps, and are thus far too vague in doing the second. A doctor, in contrast, diagnoses a problem, chooses a therapeutic approach as a guiding policy, and then recommends specific medicines, diets, and therapy as a result of the guiding policy. Action is the key to strategy: goals and theories are only part of the story.

A lot of the book feels straightforward, or at least not complicated. As Rumelt points out, however, in a world where we are often increasingly focused on the short term, there is value in forcing ourselves to think strategically. Consultants, he suggests, are not valuable because they suggest you write a checklist: they’re valuable because you actually write one when they suggest it, when otherwise you might never get around to it. I’m not sure I learned anything revolutionary while reading, but I did think deeply and in new ways about strategy and how we make decisions.

Both as a breakdown of how to think about strategy and a source of fun stories about business, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy does well. Perhaps a little too long and repetitive in parts, but it was well worth the read, and I suspect would be even more useful for someone directly involved in business.

If you want to pick up Good Strategy, Bad Strategy yourself, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the subtle illumination email list and absorb strategy from reading!

Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher

“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”

Schumacher wrote extensively about natural capital consumption and his worry about the exhaustion natural resources, culminating in Small is Beautiful in the 70s. As a result, most of the ideas it presents do not feel new, largely because the ideas have been discussed widely since then. It remains, however, beautifully written.

I particularly liked his discussion of education, and found other chapters less compelling: I thought I’d share a few particularly good quotes, however;

On Education

“The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.”

“To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.”

“If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or, shall we say, a tool-box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events.”

On Economics

“If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.”

“We must study the economics of permanence.”

“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”

“The modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technical, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment groans and gives sign of partial breakdown; and, third…the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead.”

The Righteous Mind 2 – Jonathan Haidt

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

Can liberals and conservatives understand each other? Haidt examines the priorities of each over his six bases for morality (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty). Liberals, he finds, place weight on care and liberty, with little or no interest in loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Conservatives placed weight on all the bases, with relatively more than liberals on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and equal amounts on fairness. Incidentally, liberals are also usually more sensation-seeking and open to new experiences, while conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger.

As a result, he says, liberals find it hard to reach out to or even understand conservatives, because they place no value on the moral bases of conservatives. To test this, he studies how well each side could predict how the other would respond to questions. Conservatives and moderates did well; liberals, on the other hand, did very poorly in predicting conservative responses, particularly on care and fairness questions, because they assumed conservatives attached no weight to these bases.

The problem, Haidt says, is that when we already support something, when challenged we ask ourselves if we can agree with our previous position: we look for any reason to stick with what we support. When we intuitively disagree with something, however, we look for whether we must agree, and seize on any reason not to. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for us to ignore the views of others, and rather than acknowledging that each side is acting morally but simply from different moral bases, we assume that our opponents are evil and self-interested. Interestingly, by the way, research suggests that self-interest has no predictive power when it comes to voting: instead, the interest of groups with which we self-identify is the key variable, even when that conflicts with self interest.

How do we fix this? We must interact with other people. Our brains are “terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our beliefs, but other people do us this favor.” Forming a connection with someone and then having them disagree with you is the ideal way to make sure our beliefs are challenged. If we don’t form that connection first though, we too often debate not to convince others or learn ourselves, but to score points with our own side, who need no convincing.

“It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love – love within groups – amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.”

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). I’d recommend you do.

While Canada Slept – Andrew Cohen

What’s the role of a foreign service in a world in which world leaders can just pick up a phone and call each other, or even send emails? Are they integral parts of a country’s presence, representing their interests and ideas at international conferences, summits, and meetings? Or a force of declining importance?

Though not actually about that question, While Canada Slept is influenced by it everywhere. The book laments a decline in the quality of Canada’s international presence, its military, its aid programs, and its diplomacy. To my reading, however, it begged the question of what the role of a foreign service today actually is.

In an increasingly globalized and small world, is there as large a role for representatives? Of course, there’s clearly some role for diplomats, on smaller issues or on subjects when the leaders either do not wish to speak in person, or should not. Still, is it possible to attract the top tier of talent to a profession where for any serious decision, you consult your boss in real time, thus stripping you of much of your autonomy? There is simply more oversight possible of diplomats than has been true historically, and with that may come a reduction in its appeal.

Does that mean foreign services are declining in importance? I doubt it. If anything, in a globalized world, countries have more interactions than ever, and having good representation is critical. I’m sure the foreign service will continue to get many applicants, too. Without the prestige and autonomy of the past, however, the foreign service may struggle to attract the talent it used to.

While Canada Slept is perhaps of importance largely to Canadians, focusing as it does on Canada’s role in the world and how it can best participate. Still, the questions beneath it are interesting ones, and if you find yourself interested in Canada’s role in the world, you can read further here (or in the UK or Canada).

Average is Over – Tyler Cowen

“The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?”

If you were paired with a machine to do a task, could together you do better than the machine alone? For Cowen, the answer matters more than you might think – with intelligent machines, he believes, lies the answer to The Great Stagnation he has worried about in the past.

There are two types of people in the world, he argues; those who can increase the productivity of machines, and those who will be replaced by them. One group will earn increasingly higher wages and rewards; the other will earn relatively less and less. Average is over, and though machines won’t replace human labour entirely, as the Luddites feared, they will completely change how labour is allocated.

This is not to say that computer programmers are the only ones who will make money, of course. Rather, Cowen thinks of working with machines more broadly; using the automatic checkouts in supermarkets, for example, or adapting your smartphone to improve workflow. It is these teams of humans and machines, he argues, that can really make our productivity soar. This is true of life in general, he says, not just the workplace, whether it be relationships, hobbies, or education.

It’s a provocative idea, particularly in light of today’s concerns over inequality. The Economist this week, for example, quotes Daimler as describing their employees as “robot farming” because the workers are there to shepherd the robots as they do the work; presumably the ratio of sheep to shepherds is diminishing. To my mind, Cowen has a point; the highest payoff activities in life will always be those that cannot be done by another person or machine.

What I am less sure of is how this affects young people preparing to enter the workforce. In some ways there have always been key skills that are most lucrative in the world of work, but if Cowen is correct, the segregation of students who do not learn to work with machines may be even more extreme than the income divisions between disciplines today. Is it possible, however, to conduct a classical education while also developing those skills? Should that be the point of education? Degrees that focus on deep, reflective thinking, like philosophy, may find significant difficulties adjusting if indeed they even want to. Either way, our society may lose out, as certainly do our would-be philosophers. The rise of the machines may decide much in the world to come, but under it lies a perspective that may not be compatible with everything we do – can and should we attempt to reconcile them?

Anyway, the book is clearly fascinating: you can keep reading it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Average is Over as a free advance reader copy – it is released tomorrow.