Tag Archives: Poverty

The Triple Package – Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld

“This book is about the rise and fall of groups. Its thesis is that when three distinct forces come together in a group’s culture, they propel that group to disproportionate success.”

What do the CEOs of Dell, Citigroup, Fisher-Price, and Deloitte; the majority leader of the US Senate; Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame; Stephen Covey, who wrote 7 Habits of Highly Successful People; and Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight, all have in common? They’re all Mormons, and, if you believe Chua and Rubenfeld, they have a triple package of a superiority complex, an inferiority complex, and impulse control, something they share with American hyphenated Nigerians, Muslims, Cubans, Indians, Jews, Iranians, Indian, Jews, Iranian, Lebanese, and Chinese, among others.

Amy Chua’s last book, Tiger Mother, wasn’t exactly unprovocative, and she’s clearly decided that’s how to sell books. This one argues that the large differences in the success of different immigrant groups in the US are due to cultural factors: inferiority, superiority, and impulse-control lead to drive and resilience. She worries though that those cultural factors, leading to material success as they do, also breed problems, such as materialism or an over-focus on competition.

It is empirically true that some groups do better in the US than others, of course. And unless we want to argue that genetics decide everything, culture likely plays a role in that. So far, so good, though a lot of people discussing the book don’t seem to get even that far. What’s less certain is exactly what aspects of culture matter, and frustratingly, the book lacks the analysis to really answer that question. The cultures listed have high performing members, yes: but do they also have low performing members? If the Triple Package increases the variance without increasing the mean, then the book’s argument takes on a very different slant, and I’d have loved some insight on whether that’s the case. I should admit I have the exact same problem with Tiger Mother’s discussion of parenting, by the way.

The book ends with a story of decline: the US has lost its Triple Package (except for the superiority complex), and suffers debt and an inability to plan for the long term. In the end, it actually feels like a very standard message: the ability to delay gratification is important, for both countries and individuals. Whether an inferiority or a superiority complex is a necessary component of that, however, I’m less sure. If you’re like me, you’ll find the weak statistics and overzealous claims somewhat annoying, but even if it’s only as a foil, the book at least asks interesting questions.

Out of the Ashes – David Lammy

“The riots spell out a fundamental challenge in British politics: to replace a culture in which people simply take what they want with an ethic of give and take, reciprocity, something for something.”

The Economist reviewed this book not so long ago, so I decided I’d pick it up. David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, an area of London central to the riots in 2011, and in Out of the Ashes he “explores why they happened, what [he] think[s] they tell us about Britain, and where we should go from here.”

In brief, he suggests the reason is an over-focus on individualism in modern culture. People don’t have a stake in society, and so they feel no sense of responsibility towards others. Unemployment is corrosive to our sense of who we are and what we stand for; businesses fail and we stop feeling like we’re part of a community or that we owe the community anything, least of all respect. Even in prison, the UK isolates their prisoners and prevents them from forming or keeping communities, unlike the Scandinavian model that focuses on giving prisoners social ties, to the extent of creating couples wings in prisons.

Books written by standing politicians are generally terrible, for the simple reason they want to be elected, not inform. This one is better: he still indulges in the periodic unrealistic suggestion or political haymaking to establish his credentials (I’m unconvinced of the value of giving football clubs to the people, but I’m sure it wins votes), but parts of the book are insightful. He writes well about his concerns about our modern focus on human rights, for example: they bring considerable benefits, of course, but they’ve also lead to a modern discourse where we focus on what we can do by right, instead of trying to decide the right thing to do.

Ironically, this is in some ways a small-c conservative argument, with a focus on community and group rights, though I suspect he’d disagree with that. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it’s a nice expression of feelings I think a lot of people in the UK share about the riots. Most of the policies aren’t new, but he argues well for them, whether requiring young people to help care for the elderly, reforming prisons, or a guaranteed minimum income (also known as a negative income tax). If you’re willing to wade through some standard fluff and electioneering, it’s one of the better books available about the London riots.

The Tyranny of Experts – William Easterly

“Development seems to be almost exclusively about the fate of nations rather than the fate of individuals. We seem to care more about Zambia than about Zambians.”

In the 4^th century BC, Plato sailed to Sicily in order to help educate the tyrant Dionysius the Younger, the leader of the city of Syracuse. He believed he could turn him into a philosopher-king, the perfect leader of a country, despite his tyrannical tendencies. It did not turn out well. Plato would end up banished (though it could have been worse: the tyrant’s father had sold Plato into slavery when they disagreed) and the tyrant was bad as ever until he was overthrown in a coup.

Though he doesn’t mention Plato, Easterly worries about a similar modern problem. He points to the World Bank-supported theft of land from farmers in Uganda for a British company’s forestry project, about which the World Bank refused to conduct an investigation, or their support for development policies which resulted in the forced displacement at gunpoint of around 1.5 million farmers in Ethiopia so land could be leased to foreign investors, for which UK aid is now being sued. The development industry, he argues, has a nasty habit of accepting or supporting dictators and human rights abuses in its quest for development, accepting a false bargain of material development in exchange for overlooking human rights.

Development experts get all excited about their favourite policies, and then find that the democratic process to enact those policies is messy and slow. With the best of intentions, some turn to autocracies and let the end justify the means. This, Easterly argues, is not only immoral but also ineffective. In the short run, supporting an autocrat who rewards loyalists and punishes everyone else eliminates incentives for growth: in the long run, it leaves a legacy of poverty and poor human rights for generations (see Why Nations Fail for more on this).

As befits a book that emphasizes local context, each chapter begins with the specifics of an individual or region developing, from the Mouride Brotherhood, an Islamic order based in Senegal that produces wildly successful international traders, to Hyundai in South Korea. I was disappointed that, as Easterly himself admits, the data to decide whether autocracies are bad for growth just doesn’t exist, and the book is not really convincing in either direction, though there are certainly reasons for skepticism. Readers hoping to be convinced that China is bad or good for growth will be disappointed. Well taken, however, are his moral and long run criticisms: he rightly points out that in the absence of statistical fact about whether autocracies boost growth, the burden of proof surely lies with the side that violates human rights.

Disclosure: I read The Tyranny of Experts as a free advance reader copy – it is released on March 4th. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). I’ve also had the opportunity to see Easterly speak in person about one of his previous books; he’s an excellent speaker, for what it’s worth.

Abundance – Peter Diamandis and Stever Kotler

“When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview…Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge.”

Abundance suggests we have the wrong worldview. We shouldn’t be trying to inch our way along, making marginal gains; instead, we should be trying to achieve those dramatic improvements that can really make life better for everyone. 97.3% of the world’s water is salty, and another 2% is in polar ice: bickering over the remaining .5%, the authors argue, will never lead to abundance for all.

They have some great stats. Americans, for example, spend enough time to write Wikipedia anew watching ads on TV every weekend. Microchips take 35 gallons of water to produce. And 500x more solar energy falls on the earth than the total energy consumed by humanity each year. For them the answer, as befits a book co-authored by the CEO of the X-Prize foundation, is technology. Not just to become more efficient, though that’s a good thing, but to truly make human happiness and wealth abundant. Technology, they argue, can not just alleviate our problems but actually render them irrelevant, as when the introduction of the car made the problem of horse manure in New York City an irrelevancy.

The book is a whirlwind tour of the exciting new areas of technology and research in water, food, energy (backyard nuclear devices, anyone?), health, education, and freedom: progress in waste management, organ supplies, AI, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and more. In some ways, it doesn’t add much to what’s already known – it’s a survey, not a contribution. If this is a field you’re interested in getting an overview of, though, the book is hard to beat. My only objection is their sheer optimism; it’s a book meant to be optimistic, and though I don’t in principle object, sometimes their treatment of the other side can feel superficial at best. If you’ve already read in the field, particularly Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, then you may also have heard much of it before. Still, the book remains a light but engaging read, and an important reminder that there is reason for optimism in what is often a pessimistic world.

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 Wealth and Poverty of Nations 2 – David Landes

“The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a skeptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”

I gave broad thoughts on David Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations earlier this week, but today I’m going to try to give a flavour of the kind of broad themes he talks about. This, I think, is the real strength of the book: the breadth of scope and insight it brings to bear,

The kind of broad questions he tackles are not thought about enough, I think. Sung China had mechanized power in ironmaking; Europe had windmills; early modern Italy had shipbuilding. Why didn’t they have an Industrial Revolution? Why did England? And why in the 18^th century?

He argues it occurred in the UK for 3 reasons. The autonomy of intellectual inquiry, the method and language of understanding science and discovery, and the invention of invention (the routinization of research), all, he argues, contributed to England’s success. Other countries in Europe had obstacles to development, holdovers from the medieval period like serfs, guilds, and trade barriers, while the UK led the way in changing those institutions to suit the new economy. In addition, he gives some credit to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, though he is equally happy to credit a Buddhist work ethic that emphasizes the same virtues. A follower of any religion can have the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, etc., he points out, but perhaps the incentives were higher for Protestants.

Most of us have heard of the industrial revolution, but it’s the uncommon book that can really capture the industrial evolution from mechanized textiles, which led to steel through a focus on process, which led to dyes made with coal byproducts, which would in turn spawn modern chemistry, of critical importance to World War I. After that, food refrigeration and processing would further modernize and globalize the world, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Something he doesn’t appear to be familiar with is some work I’ve seen by Bob Allen, the economic historian at Oxford. He has built estimates of real wages for labour in countries around the world for much of history, and argues a key driver of the location of the industrial revolution was the price of labour. In the UK, the return to adopting a spinning jenny was 40%, because the employees it replaced were so expensive: in India, the return was negative 4%, because labour was cheap. I suspect Landes would happily agree with this as a driver, so it was a shame it didn’t appear he’d seen it.

For me, his thoroughness on the industrial and colonial periods is his greatest strength, and he does well to spend considerable time on other regions, like South America and Asia. The one notable exception is Africa, which though mentioned in reference to other regions is given little time itself. It’s possible he left it out due to time, but it is an unfortunate absence. For perhaps the same reason, his concluding chapters feel weak. Still, for the middle chapters alone, the book may well be worth it.

If you do want that deep knowledge of how rich countries developed their wealth, you get can the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list!

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations – David Landes

“The Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, making it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by estranging winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds.”

If I had been asked what I thought 100 pages in, I would have been quite negative, I think. Landes attempts to write an economic history of the world, and in his first hundred pages or so he covers pre-industrial revolution. It felt disorganized: he has vast knowledge of the subject, but the interjections and tangents were overwhelming, and I am dubious about the accuracy of some of them.

Once he got onto the era of the Industrial Revolution though, he began to shine. His chapters on Japan (he argues that had Europeans not intervened, they might well have had an industrial revolution of their own – I had no idea that because early Japan guaranteed riparian cultivator rights so strongly, they actually built boat-mounted waterwheels!) are fascinating, and he does well to focus on finding the reasons why things happen, instead of ascribing historical events to chance. His studies of colonial powers are equally interesting, highlighting differences between the different powers and their influences in a comprehensive way that is not done enough. Where else can one learn that early England was mostly about privateers and piracy rather than colonies, and as a result the crown issued sailor uniforms without pockets so they couldn’t steal things from the captured ships before the crown got its share?

In some ways it’s a good but weaker precursor to Why Nations Fail: Landes too emphasizes institutions, though he also gives credit to geography, culture, and other factors. His knowledge, however, is considerably more comprehensive, and flipping to any point in the book can reveal an enormous depth of knowledge on the subject at hand (Galileo was in trouble for the same reason inexpensive pornography used to be banned in Italy: such things were fine for those with refined tastes, but not appropriate for the masses. Galileo published in Italian, not Latin). That can be both fascinating and frustrating, but it’s certainly impressive.

Overall, then, I’m impressed. I might skip the first few chapters and the last few, but the middle is well worth the read. Whether that means the book is worth reading overall, I suppose, depends on how much of a hurry you’re in: I’d suggest Why Nations Fail as a speedier, but less comprehensive and content-rich, alternative.

If you do want that deep knowledge of how rich countries developed their wealth, you get can the book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list!

The World Until Yesterday 1 – Jared Diamond

“Traditional societies represent thousands of millennia-long natural experiments in organizing human lives. We can’t repeat those experiments by redesigning thousands of societies today in order to wait decades and observe the outcomes; we have to learn from the societies that already ran the experiments.”

A bit late on posting this – apologies. It’s been a busy week.

We too often mistake past cultures based on flawed information and unconscious assumptions. Jared Diamond has actually done the research, and has the breadth of knowledge to make interesting, provocative, and informative assertions on the nature of humanity and human society.

As a result, The World Until Yesterday is a great book. Jared Diamond is an absolute master of his field, as readers of his other books can attest, and his breadth of examples and insights is exhaustive. In past books though, he has tended to take a single thesis, and argue for it based on case studies. Here, Diamond examines 9 broad themes, discussing how we treat them in the modern world, and how they were treated then. In some ways, we are clearly better off: in other ways we are perhaps not. Those nine themes are dividing space, peace/dispute resolution, war, raising children, treatment of elderly, danger response, religion, language, and diet/lifestyle.

Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway is that there are many possible ways of organizing a society, and that the narrow field of possibilities we experience for ourselves is just that: narrow. Some of these alternatives are probably undesirable from the modern standpoint: among the Kaulong people, when a man died, his brothers would strangle his widow, or in their absence, one of her sons. If they failed to do so fast enough, the widow would mock and humiliate them in order to pressure them to fulfill their obligation. Others, though, have a definite appeal, as with care for children and elderly, or our diets.

Exactly what we should learn from traditional societies is up for debate, and Diamond does not attempt to reach a consensus. His point is more profound: that we should at the very least think about other possible ways of organizing our societies, and that traditional cultures provide a way to see other possibilities in action. As they shrink and disappear, we lose a cultural laboratory of untold richness.

If you’re interested in how human society works (and if you ask me, you should be), then you should read this book, no questions asked. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Later this week, I’ll look at a few of the specific examples contained within.

River Notes – Wade Davis

“To walk down a gravel road just south of the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado and watch what remains of the Colorado pass through rusted culverts, bringing not fertility but toxicity to the land, is to ask what on earth become of this stream so revered in the American imagination, and yet now so despoiled that it today reaches the ocean a river only in name.”

If you’ve ever been in North America during the winter and eaten lettuce, you’ve drunk from the Colorado. The Yuma region, which gets 4 inches of rain a year, grows 95% of North America’s winter lettuce, watered almost exclusively by the Colorado. Without the river, America would be forced to largely abandon southern California and Arizona, and much of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming; upwards of 25 million people forced to relocate, not to mention eat less lettuce. As it withers, the animals, plants, and natural beauty that rely on it wither too.

Wade Davis mourns its treatment. Wade Davis, for those who don’t know him, is a possessor of one of the coolest jobs I’m familiar with, being one of the seven permanent Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and is the guy who explored how zombies were created in Haiti.

Framed by his own rafting journey down the Grand Canyon, he weaves together stories of the native people around the river, both the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, whose ruins cover the area, as well as extant groups; the stories of the first Europeans to explore the river; its geological and natural history; and its exploitation through dam construction and water diversions.

Americans may find his lament particularly powerful, but beyond enjoyment of his beautiful writing, I also took away a number of broader lessons. Water is a resource we tend to squander, and we have not yet begun to bear the costs of such behaviour, at least in the Western world. We also tend to lionize dams as a solution to global warming, and as such River Notes is a useful reminder that they too have costs, like all sources of energy. Most of all, though, he ends on an optimistic call to action: to maintain the Colorado ecosystem may take as little as 1% of the total flow, and if it were not for “cows eating alfalfa in a landscape where neither really belongs,” he points out, the entire crisis could be averted. It takes, after all, over 1800 litres of water to raise a pound of beef.

Disclosure: I read River Notes as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Saturday. You can get it 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.