By Matt Miller, Tuesday, August 21, 6:23 AM
As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.
Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.
Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.
(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).
Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.
Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”
Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”
Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-host of public radio’s “Left, Right & Center.” He writes a weekly online column for The Post.
Showing posts with label Social Sciences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Sciences. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Thursday, July 07, 2011
The Unexamined Society By DAVID BROOKS
The Unexamined Society By DAVID BROOKS
Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a number of gigantic policies produce disappointing results — policies to reduce poverty, homelessness, dropout rates, single-parenting and drug addiction. Many of these policies failed because they were based on an overly simplistic view of human nature. They assumed that people responded in straightforward ways to incentives. Often, they assumed that money could cure behavior problems.Fortunately, today we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real-world applications. Here’s one simple example:
When you renew your driver’s license, you have a chance to enroll in an organ donation program. In countries like Germany and the U.S., you have to check a box if you want to opt in. Roughly 14 percent of people do. But behavioral scientists have discovered that how you set the defaults is really important. So in other countries, like Poland or France, you have to check a box if you want to opt out. In these countries, more than 90 percent of people participate.
This is a gigantic behavior difference cued by one tiny and costless change in procedure.
Yet in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.
Let’s say you want to reduce poverty. We have two traditional understandings of poverty. The first presumes people are rational. They are pursuing their goals effectively and don’t need much help in changing their behavior. The second presumes that the poor are afflicted by cultural or psychological dysfunctions that sometimes lead them to behave in shortsighted ways. Neither of these theories has produced much in the way of effective policies.
Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard have recently, with federal help, been exploring a third theory, that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.
These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.
Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.
Princeton students don’t usually face extreme financial scarcity, but they do face time scarcity. In one game, they had to answer questions in a series of timed rounds, but they could borrow time from future rounds. When they were scrambling amid time scarcity, they were quick to borrow time, and they were nearly oblivious to the usurious interest rates the game organizers were charging. These brilliant Princeton kids were rushing to the equivalent of payday lenders, to their own long-term detriment.
Shafir and Mullainathan have a book coming out next year, exploring how scarcity — whether of time, money or calories (while dieting) — affects your psychology. They are also studying how poor people’s self-perceptions shape behavior. Many people don’t sign up for the welfare benefits because they are intimidated by the forms. Shafir and Mullainathan asked some people at a Trenton soup kitchen to relive a moment when they felt competent and others to recount a neutral experience. Nearly half of the self-affirming group picked up an available benefits package afterward. Only 16 percent of the neutral group did.
People are complicated. We each have multiple selves, which emerge or don’t depending on context. If we’re going to address problems, we need to understand the contexts and how these tendencies emerge or don’t emerge. We need to design policies around that knowledge. Cutting off financing for this sort of research now is like cutting off navigation financing just as Christopher Columbus hit the shoreline of the New World.
Monday, June 13, 2011
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
13 JUNE, 2011
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.
Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.
DATA VISUALIZATIONLong before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like iconic designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.
Images courtesy of insect54
JAZZAs a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.
The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia
COSMOLOGYIn 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”
INFORMATION THEORYThe future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.
We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick
But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.
MONEYIn The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson
Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.
CLASSICAL MUSICClassical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross
Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.
WRITINGWhen it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.
The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. [...] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish
FILMHoward Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.’”
Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.
Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber
SCIENCE FICTIONScience fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”
We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”
The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)
HAPPINESSEarlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.
The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
* * *
What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?
(Almost) Everything You Need to Know about Culture in 10 Books by Maria Popova
What the limits of the universe have to do with the history of jazz and the secret of happiness.
Last week, I was reorganizing my library and realized that some of my favorite books are ones that introduced me to subjects I either admired but knew little about or was unaware of altogether. The kinds of reads that profoundly enrich one’s lens on the world. So I thought I’d put together a modest reading list of essential primers for, well, everything. Okay, maybe not everything — I’m keenly aware of how laughable that proposition is — but a fair amount to offer a basis for the kind of cross-disciplinary understanding of culture that I believe is crucial to contributing to the world in a meaningful way. To begin, here are ten essential primers on everything from jazz to data visualization to money.
DATA VISUALIZATIONLong before there was The Visual Miscellaneum or Data Flow, there was Graphis diagrams: The graphic visualization of abstract data — a seminal vision for the convergence of aesthetics and information value, originally published in 1974, which codified the conventions of contemporary data visualization and information design. One of the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, it features work by icons like iconic designer and animator Saul Bass, Brain Pickings favorite Milton Glaser, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and many more.
Images courtesy of insect54
JAZZAs a lover of jazz, I was thrilled for this month’s release of The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia‘s fascinating and ambitious cultural biography of the genre, though such classification is incredibly reductionist, that permeated just about every facet of creative culture, social dynamics and politics.
The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audience not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of vernacular forms of culture into serious art. This tendency is evident not only — or even primarily — in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-mined times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion — of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low — will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.” ~ Ted Gioia
COSMOLOGYIn 1988, legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote what’s commonly held as the most important book in popular science ever published. A Brief History of Time attempted to answer one of humanity’s most fundamental questions — where did the universe come from? — and tackled the complex subject of cosmology through a multitude of angles, including the Big Bang theory, black holes, high mathematics, the nature of time, gravity and much more, yet did it in a way digestible enough to invite the non-expert reader to consider the universe in an entirely new way. (Eight years later, a fantastic illustrated edition offered a revised, updated and expanded version of the book.) With a foreword by none other than Carl Sagan, the book remains a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for understanding the cosmos, our place in it, how we got there and where we might be going.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
If we find [a unified theory], it would be the ultimate triumph — for then we would know the mind of God.”
INFORMATION THEORYThe future of information is something I’m deeply interested in, but no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of its past. Running the risk of overbeating that drum — since I both reviewed it separately earlier this year and placed it atop my annual summer reading list for 2011 — I still maintain that James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is the most important and ambitious work in illuminating human communication and media theory since the days of Marshall McLuhan. Gleick illustrates the central dogma of information theory through a riveting journey across African drum languages, the story of the Morse code, the history of the French optical telegraph, and a number of other fascinating facets of humanity’s infinite quest to transmit what matters with ever-greater efficiency.
We know about streaming information, parsing it, sorting it, matching it, and filtering it. Our furniture includes iPods and plasma screens, our skills include texting and Googling, we are endowed, we are expert, so we see information in the foreground. But it has always been there.” ~ James Gleick
But what makes the book truly shine is that, unlike some of his more techno-dystopian contemporaries, Gleick roots his core argument in a certain faith in humanity, in our moral and intellectual capacity for elevation, making the evolution and flood of information an occasion to celebrate new opportunities and expand our limits, rather than to despair over our limitations.
MONEYIn The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling case for banking and the development of currency as a central force behind how civilization has evolved. As we begin to emerge from one of the biggest global recessions in recorded history, Ferguson offers a timely and timeless reminder of one of the greatest truths in financial history and, I would add, human psychology at large: Sooner or later, every bubble bursts. What makes the book even more interesting is that Ferguson completed his research for it prior to the actual economic recession in the U.S., yet many of his insights and conclusions presage what was about to happen with uncanny accuracy.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like theMedici mad fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.” ~ Niall Ferguson
Above all, the book — one of 5 must-read books by this year’s TED Global speakers and a companion read to a BBC documentary of the same name, now free to watch online — is an admirable effort to break down what Ferguson calls “the dangerous barrier which has arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge,” a hallmark of the holistic knowledge and cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe are the key to a richer, more creative, more intelligent life.
CLASSICAL MUSICClassical music is something most people recognize for its cultural importance, but admire from a safe distance. Yet its influence on contemporary culture, both musically and beyond, is wide and all-permeating. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dances across the most essential 20th-century pieces in major and minor with so much grace and eloquence that you emerge with a newfound understanding for and appreciation of the beautiful language of classical music. From Strauss to Mahler to Coltrane to Glass, from politics to technological innovation to art history, Ross offers a biographical, historical and social context for the most elevated soundtrack of the past century and extends an invitation to listen to it with new ears and new heart.
Because composers have infiltrated every aspect of modern existence, their work can be depicted only on the largest possible canvas. The Rest Is Noise chronicles not only the artists themselves but also the politicians, dictators, millionaire patrons, and CEOs who tried to control what music was written; the intellectuals who attempted to adjudicate style; the writers, painters, dancers, and filmmakers who provided companionship on lonely roads of exploration; the audiences who variously reveled in, reviled, or ignored what composers were doing; the technologies that changed how music was made and heard; and the revolutions, hot and cold wars, waves of emigration, and deeper social transformations that reshape the landscape in which composers worked.” ~ Alex Ross
Ross’s sequel, Listen to This, is one of 7 must-read books on music, emotion and the brain.
WRITINGWhen it was published earlier this year, it didn’t take long to recognize How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by New York Times columnist Stanley Fish as the most important and ambitious work on the art and craft of language since Strunk and White’s iconic 1918 classic, The Elements of Style. In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal to some of the cultish mandates of Strunk and White’s bible, most notably the blind insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To make his case, he picks apart some of history’s most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of beautiful language through its fundamental building block, the sentence.
The pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement — here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting. [...] I carry the sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.” ~ Stanley Fish
FILMHoward Suber is considered America’s most distinguished film scholar, having founded the UCLA Film Archive and dramatically reformed the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The Power of Film is nothing short of a remarkable reflection of his reputation and his lifetime of teaching film. In fact, screenwriter David Koepp might not be exaggerating when he says that what Aristotle did for drama, Suber has done for film. The book is essentially a laboratory exploring the patterns, principles and elements of cinematic storytelling that make a film successful, memorable and culturally impactful. And, as Francis Ford Coppola points out about the book, “[m]uch of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.’”
Popular films are a special kind of drama. While much that is in them can be traced back to the ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works were performed in a kind of popular theater for Athenians, only some of what was true for dramatists and their audiences then continues to be true twenty-five centuries later.
Popular films have their own principles, patterns and structures. These deal not so much with style and technique as with the psychology of storytelling, which ultimately is the psychology of contemporary human beings.” ~ Howard Suber
SCIENCE FICTIONScience fiction is a relatively nascent literary genre, and yet it has become intricately intertwined with much of contemporary culture, from entertainment to design to scientific inquiry to technological innovation. As Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously noted in a 1980 letter, “[t]he links between science fiction and science are well-established.” In The Secret History of Science Fiction anthologists James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel offer a fascinating parallel history of the genre born out of an active rebellion against the very term “genre” and a frustration with the multitude of definitions of “science fiction.”
We understand why some might say that, after the mid-1970s, sf went back to the playroom, never to be taken seriously again. But they do a vast disservice to the writers and readers of the next thirty years. What we hope to present in this anthology is an alternative vision of sf from the early 1970s to the present, one in which it becomes evident that the literary potential of sf was not squandered. We offer evidence that the developments of the 1960s and early ’70s have been carried forth, if mostly outside of the public eye. For years they have been overshadowed by popular media sf and best-selling books that cater to the media audience. And at the same time that, on one side of the genre divide, sf was being written at the highest levels of ambition, on the other side, writers came to use the materials of sf for their own purposes, writing fiction that is clearly science fiction, but not identified by that name.”
The book features 19 stories from iconic authors, many not classically considered science fiction writers, including Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem and George Saunders. (It’s also incredibly refreshing to see such a gender-balanced anthology.)
HAPPINESSEarlier this year, I did an extensive reading list of what I consider to be the 7 most essential books on the art and science of happiness. Topping it was Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which examines millennia of philosophical thought on the grand question of what makes us happy to unearth ten great theories of happiness discovered by the thinkers of the past. From Plato to Jesus to Buddha, they reveal a surprising abundance of common tangents. (For example, from Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” From Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
Haidt takes this ambitious analysis of philosophical thought over the centuries and examines it through the prism of modern psychology research to paint a profound portrait of our civilization’s understanding of happiness and extract a remarkably compelling blueprint for optimizing the human condition for well-being.
The story begins with an account of how the human mind works. Not a full account, of course, just two ancient truths that must be understood before you can take advantage of modern psychology to improve your life. The first truth is the foundational idea of this book: The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. Nowadays, we know the causes of these divisions, and a few ways to help the rider and the elephant work better as a team.” ~ Jonathan Haidt
* * *
What are the books that gave you new understanding of something or opened your eyes to a facet of culture that had been previously foreign to you?
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds By Brandon Keim
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds By Brandon Keim 
- May 16, 2011 |
- 6:30 pm |
- Categories: Brains and Behavior
When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance.
In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry.
“Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines” collective wisdom, wrote researchers led by mathematician Jan Lorenz and sociologist Heiko Rahut of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16. “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.”
The effect — perhaps better described as the accuracy of crowds, since it best applies to questions involving quantifiable estimates — has been described for decades, beginning with Francis Galton’s 1907 account of fairgoers guessing an ox’s weight< It reached mainstream prominence with economist James Surowiecki's 2004 bestseller, The Wisdom of Crowds.
Study participants were asked how many murders occurred in Switzerland in 2006. At the end of each round of questioning, they were given small payments for coming close to the actual answer (signified by the gray bar). At left is the range of responses among participants who received no information about others.
Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. Computer modeling of crowd behavior also hints at dynamics underlying crowd breakdowns, with he balance between information flow and diverse opinions becoming skewed.
Lorenz and Rahut’s experiment fits between large-scale, real-world messiness and theoretical investigation. They recruited 144 students from ETH Zurich, sitting them in isolated cubicles and asking them to guess Switzerland’s population density, the length of its border with Italy, the number of new immigrants to Zurich and how many crimes were committed in 2006.
After answering, test subjects were given a small monetary reward based on their answer’s accuracy, then asked again. This proceeded for four more rounds; and while some students didn’t learn what their peers guessed, others were told.
As testing progressed, the average answers of independent test subjects became more accurate, in keeping with the wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Socially influenced test subjects, however, actually became less accurate.
The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses.
“The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment.
“Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
How Your Income Stacks Up by Kevin McCormally
How Your Income Stacks Up by Kevin McCormally
Wednesday, December 23, 2009provided by Kiplinger'sPersonalFinance
Where do you rank as a taxpayer? You may not feel rich earning $35,000 a year, but you're in the top half of taxpayers. Make $70,000, and you earn more than 75 percent of fellow taxpayers.
Even as the Great Recession ends, we know the economic wounds it inflicted will take years to heal. The national unemployment rate has breached 10 percent, and unemployment is higher than 12 percent in California and above 15 percent in Michigan. A new study from the Department of Agriculture found that nearly 50 million Americans struggled at some point in 2008 to get enough to eat.
More than 40 million Americans are officially living in poverty. And you might be surprised at how little income it takes to not be considered poor by the federal government. For 2008, the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65 was an income of $11,201, or less than $1,000 a month. For a family of four, the threshold was $21,834. For a family of six, $28,769.
With that perspective, you may wonder just how your income stacks up against that of your fellow citizens. New statistics from the IRS provide an answer. The numbers here come from an analysis of 2007 tax returns, the most recent ones that have been studied.
The data show that an income of $32,879 or more puts you in the top half of taxpayers. Earning a bit more than twice that much -- $66,532 -- earns you a spot among the top 25 percent of all earners. You crack the elite top 10 percent if you earn more than $113,018.
And $410,096 buys top bragging rights: Earn that much or more and you're among the top 1 percent of all American earners.
Kiplinger has developed an online calculator to quickly show you -- based on your personal adjusted gross income -- into which income category you fall and, as a bonus, what percentage of the nation's tax burden is borne collectively by you and your fellow citizens who are in that income category. The following table shows the income categories and the percentage of income earned and tax burden paid by each category.
Income.jpg
Copyrighted, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.
how-your-income-stacks-up: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance (28 December 2009)
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/108460/how-your-income-stacks-up?mod=career-salary_negotiation
http://snipurl.com/tw6e4
Wednesday, December 23, 2009provided by Kiplinger'sPersonalFinance
Where do you rank as a taxpayer? You may not feel rich earning $35,000 a year, but you're in the top half of taxpayers. Make $70,000, and you earn more than 75 percent of fellow taxpayers.
Even as the Great Recession ends, we know the economic wounds it inflicted will take years to heal. The national unemployment rate has breached 10 percent, and unemployment is higher than 12 percent in California and above 15 percent in Michigan. A new study from the Department of Agriculture found that nearly 50 million Americans struggled at some point in 2008 to get enough to eat.
More than 40 million Americans are officially living in poverty. And you might be surprised at how little income it takes to not be considered poor by the federal government. For 2008, the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65 was an income of $11,201, or less than $1,000 a month. For a family of four, the threshold was $21,834. For a family of six, $28,769.
With that perspective, you may wonder just how your income stacks up against that of your fellow citizens. New statistics from the IRS provide an answer. The numbers here come from an analysis of 2007 tax returns, the most recent ones that have been studied.
The data show that an income of $32,879 or more puts you in the top half of taxpayers. Earning a bit more than twice that much -- $66,532 -- earns you a spot among the top 25 percent of all earners. You crack the elite top 10 percent if you earn more than $113,018.
And $410,096 buys top bragging rights: Earn that much or more and you're among the top 1 percent of all American earners.
Kiplinger has developed an online calculator to quickly show you -- based on your personal adjusted gross income -- into which income category you fall and, as a bonus, what percentage of the nation's tax burden is borne collectively by you and your fellow citizens who are in that income category. The following table shows the income categories and the percentage of income earned and tax burden paid by each category.
Income.jpg
Copyrighted, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.
how-your-income-stacks-up: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance (28 December 2009)
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/108460/how-your-income-stacks-up?mod=career-salary_negotiation
http://snipurl.com/tw6e4
Saturday, August 08, 2009
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond By David Pilling
Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond By David Pilling
Published: August 7 2009 15:22 | Last updated: August 7 2009 15:22
Jared DiamondJared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.
Diamond's celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs andSteel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.
The question lurking in Diamond's work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias's trunkless legs of stone?
Such thoughts are not top of my mind as I swing, in a bright yellow cab, past the splendid mansions of Bel Air under a cloudless Los Angeles sky. I had proposed meeting Diamond in Papua New Guinea, the place where his background in anthropology and evolutionary biology began to converge. Diamond had replied that he rarely made it to Papua New Guinea these days, and why didn't we have lunch at his Californian home instead.
After graduating from Harvard and then Cambridge, where he studied membrane biophysics, Diamond devoted years to researching the way substances, such as sugar, find their way in and out of cells. "I was the world's gall bladder expert," is how the 71-year-old describes his early years in academia. The gall bladder proved too confined a world. In his 20s, he studied the ornithology of New Guinea, publishing his first book, Avifauna of the EasternHighlands of New Guinea, in 1972. Over the next two decades he began to apply multi-scientific disciplines – including linguistics, evolutionary biology and environmental history – to big questions. The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992 about human development, was followed by Why Sex isFun, the subject of which is pretty self-explanatory, and in 1998, Guns, Germs andSteel, the breakthrough work that brought him plaudits from scientists and generalists alike.
Set back from the road behind a white picket fence, Diamond's home is smaller and less gaudy than the surrounding mansions and mock châteaux. Nonetheless, it is quietly splendid. The professor of geography at UCLA, who is working on a book about what modern civilisation can learn from tribal societies, is waiting at the threshold to greet me. He is wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and casual slacks. Even from a distance I spot his white-peppered beard, neatly trimmed, in almost Amish style.
We make our way through a large hallway to the spacious kitchen at the rear. Diamond's wife is on her way out. Calling her "sweetie", he gives her a kiss and then, opening the cavernous refrigerator, announces in town-crier fashion: "Jared Diamond declares that he is about to pull out the California speciality of pomegranate juice, to which a story attaches. And then it is salmon, and orzo with spinach and bacon, and mixed vegetables that include squash with sage. And there is also yoghurt and there is an avocado and there is grapefruit."
I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything. Diamond ferries dishes to the large wooden table at which I am seated, my back to a pristine lawn. The plates he sets before me include one bearing a strikingly large wedge of chilled, delicately pink salmon that turns out to be the most succulent I have ever tasted.
As he moves between fridge and table, he launches into his pomegranate story. "Pomegranate was one of the first fruits domesticated in the world. It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 4000 BC," he says. "A friend of mine, a very successful businessman, bought farm acreage in the central valley of California, which is the most productive agricultural area in the US. And there happened to be 100 acres of pomegranates, about which he knew very little. So he started learning about them and discovered how healthy they are, that they are full of vitamins and full of antioxidants and that they may be a treatment for prostate cancer."
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
The friend, Stewart Resnick, had the capital and commercial acumen to spread the message to the US consumer. Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend's financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.
There is no obvious segue between pomegranates and the recent shock to Anglo-Saxon capitalism but we get there via a discussion of collapsing fish stocks, a subject prompted by the salmon. Diamond knows I used to live in Japan and says, "If I was Japan's worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years' time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein." Humans' ability to destroy the basis of their own livelihood is a recurring Diamond theme.
"There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we're seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya," he continues. "The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak."
He helps himself to a mouthful of vegetables, bought from the supermarket but as fresh-tasting as if he had dug them from the garden. Chewing slowly, he continues: "The Maya collapse began in the late 700s, and then simply the most advanced society in the New World collapsed over the course of several decades. They were mostly gone a century later," he says wistfully. "When a complex structure like that starts collapsing, you are pulling out dominoes in the whole structure."
I ask whether Lehman Brothers is such a domino. "The events of last October have crept up seemingly so suddenly," he replies: "I say 'seemingly' because, in a sense, it is not at all sudden. Any idiot knows that if you are drawing more money out of your bank than you are paying into your bank, then eventually something is going to happen. Somehow this lesson escaped the decision-makers in the US government."
Much of his writing suggests that only those societies able to stamp out unsustainable habits – over-logging, overspending, over-extension – have the ability to survive, I say, helping myself to more pomegranate juice. One might conclude that free-market economies, with less ability to rein in over-consumption of blue-fin tuna or over-leverage of red-blooded bankers, were more vulnerable to sudden failure.
But Diamond rejects the notion that his work can be read as advocating authoritarian central planning. "When people talk about the greater efficiency of dictatorships, they are forgetting that a dictatorship is no more likely than a democracy to make a wise decision," he says. The Chinese government moved quickly to ban lead in petrol, but it also virtually abolished education during a phase of the Cultural Revolution, he says. A democracy could never do that.
"This is orzo," he says, his mind turning to the barley-shaped pasta he is spooning onto my plate. As he traipses off to fetch a selection of teas, I notice he is wearing blue cloth sandals. A lawnmower buzzes in the background. In a hutch on the kitchen floor, a large rabbit munches away quietly. "You are welcome to try these," he says, returning with some fancy-labelled bottles. "We have pomegranate lychee green tea, pomegranate hibiscus green tea, pomegranate white tea."
Diamond strikes me as such a thoughtful man, so empathetic to other cultures and so obviously liberal in his outlook, that I was surprised to learn that some critics have described him as something close to a racist. According to his detractors, he puts too much emphasis on the environment and too little on social factors, thereby implying that people cannot change their physical inheritance.
But Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that sets out to discover why Europeans conquered the Aztecs, and not the other way around, seems to me a cogent demolition of racism. Dismissing as nonsense the argument that Europeans were racially or culturally superior, the book seeks to find the real reasons.
"Why do they say it is racism?" Diamond winces, clearly upset. "I think mainly because I discussed the subject at all. But I discuss why X conquered Y because it is a big question of history." He pauses before addressing his imaginary critics: "It is perverse and weird." Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a swipe at those who suggest his books preclude choice. There is plenty of room for free will, he says. Yet he is sticking to his conviction that geography – the ease with which wild plants can be domesticated, or the prevalence of certain diseases – can have profound effects on a society's development.
"Was it a cultural choice that the Inuit up in the Arctic did not become farmers? No, it wasn't. You could not have agriculture in the Arctic," he bristles. "So it seems to me that the rise of agriculture in the modern world really does involve strong environmental influences. And if you want to call that geographical determinism, you can call it geographical determinism. Except that we are taught to react to that like you should react to wife-beating and incest with your mother: we all know it is not nice, and that it should be stopped.
"I find the easiest way to eat these is just to cut off the top and then break it into segments," he says, his focus suddenly narrowing from controversies of human agriculture to the single grapefruit before us. The abundance of food in his kitchen prompts me to return to the theme of sustainability.
"The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world," says Diamond. "That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans." The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.
Can't humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? "We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops," he says. "Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world's fresh water. So you say, 'Alright, we'll get around water by desalinating sea water.' But then there's the energy ceiling, and so on."
With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. "I'm inconsistent," he shrugs. But if we can't supply more or consume less, doesn't that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?
"No. It is our choice," he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. "If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed," he says, draining his pomegranate juice. "The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don't learn to operate sustainably."
David Pilling is the FT's Asia editor
..................................................
Jared Diamond's house
Bel Air, Los Angeles
Chilled salmon
Orzo with bacon and spinach
Mixed roast vegetables
One avocado
One grapefruit
One pomegranate lychee green tea
Lots of pomegranate juice
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
Published: August 7 2009 15:22 | Last updated: August 7 2009 15:22
Jared DiamondJared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.
Diamond's celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs andSteel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.
The question lurking in Diamond's work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias's trunkless legs of stone?
Such thoughts are not top of my mind as I swing, in a bright yellow cab, past the splendid mansions of Bel Air under a cloudless Los Angeles sky. I had proposed meeting Diamond in Papua New Guinea, the place where his background in anthropology and evolutionary biology began to converge. Diamond had replied that he rarely made it to Papua New Guinea these days, and why didn't we have lunch at his Californian home instead.
After graduating from Harvard and then Cambridge, where he studied membrane biophysics, Diamond devoted years to researching the way substances, such as sugar, find their way in and out of cells. "I was the world's gall bladder expert," is how the 71-year-old describes his early years in academia. The gall bladder proved too confined a world. In his 20s, he studied the ornithology of New Guinea, publishing his first book, Avifauna of the EasternHighlands of New Guinea, in 1972. Over the next two decades he began to apply multi-scientific disciplines – including linguistics, evolutionary biology and environmental history – to big questions. The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992 about human development, was followed by Why Sex isFun, the subject of which is pretty self-explanatory, and in 1998, Guns, Germs andSteel, the breakthrough work that brought him plaudits from scientists and generalists alike.
Set back from the road behind a white picket fence, Diamond's home is smaller and less gaudy than the surrounding mansions and mock châteaux. Nonetheless, it is quietly splendid. The professor of geography at UCLA, who is working on a book about what modern civilisation can learn from tribal societies, is waiting at the threshold to greet me. He is wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and casual slacks. Even from a distance I spot his white-peppered beard, neatly trimmed, in almost Amish style.
We make our way through a large hallway to the spacious kitchen at the rear. Diamond's wife is on her way out. Calling her "sweetie", he gives her a kiss and then, opening the cavernous refrigerator, announces in town-crier fashion: "Jared Diamond declares that he is about to pull out the California speciality of pomegranate juice, to which a story attaches. And then it is salmon, and orzo with spinach and bacon, and mixed vegetables that include squash with sage. And there is also yoghurt and there is an avocado and there is grapefruit."
I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything. Diamond ferries dishes to the large wooden table at which I am seated, my back to a pristine lawn. The plates he sets before me include one bearing a strikingly large wedge of chilled, delicately pink salmon that turns out to be the most succulent I have ever tasted.
As he moves between fridge and table, he launches into his pomegranate story. "Pomegranate was one of the first fruits domesticated in the world. It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 4000 BC," he says. "A friend of mine, a very successful businessman, bought farm acreage in the central valley of California, which is the most productive agricultural area in the US. And there happened to be 100 acres of pomegranates, about which he knew very little. So he started learning about them and discovered how healthy they are, that they are full of vitamins and full of antioxidants and that they may be a treatment for prostate cancer."
OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS
Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson
Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:
Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."
Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."
Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."
The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
The friend, Stewart Resnick, had the capital and commercial acumen to spread the message to the US consumer. Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend's financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.
There is no obvious segue between pomegranates and the recent shock to Anglo-Saxon capitalism but we get there via a discussion of collapsing fish stocks, a subject prompted by the salmon. Diamond knows I used to live in Japan and says, "If I was Japan's worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years' time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein." Humans' ability to destroy the basis of their own livelihood is a recurring Diamond theme.
"There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we're seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya," he continues. "The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak."
He helps himself to a mouthful of vegetables, bought from the supermarket but as fresh-tasting as if he had dug them from the garden. Chewing slowly, he continues: "The Maya collapse began in the late 700s, and then simply the most advanced society in the New World collapsed over the course of several decades. They were mostly gone a century later," he says wistfully. "When a complex structure like that starts collapsing, you are pulling out dominoes in the whole structure."
I ask whether Lehman Brothers is such a domino. "The events of last October have crept up seemingly so suddenly," he replies: "I say 'seemingly' because, in a sense, it is not at all sudden. Any idiot knows that if you are drawing more money out of your bank than you are paying into your bank, then eventually something is going to happen. Somehow this lesson escaped the decision-makers in the US government."
Much of his writing suggests that only those societies able to stamp out unsustainable habits – over-logging, overspending, over-extension – have the ability to survive, I say, helping myself to more pomegranate juice. One might conclude that free-market economies, with less ability to rein in over-consumption of blue-fin tuna or over-leverage of red-blooded bankers, were more vulnerable to sudden failure.
But Diamond rejects the notion that his work can be read as advocating authoritarian central planning. "When people talk about the greater efficiency of dictatorships, they are forgetting that a dictatorship is no more likely than a democracy to make a wise decision," he says. The Chinese government moved quickly to ban lead in petrol, but it also virtually abolished education during a phase of the Cultural Revolution, he says. A democracy could never do that.
"This is orzo," he says, his mind turning to the barley-shaped pasta he is spooning onto my plate. As he traipses off to fetch a selection of teas, I notice he is wearing blue cloth sandals. A lawnmower buzzes in the background. In a hutch on the kitchen floor, a large rabbit munches away quietly. "You are welcome to try these," he says, returning with some fancy-labelled bottles. "We have pomegranate lychee green tea, pomegranate hibiscus green tea, pomegranate white tea."
Diamond strikes me as such a thoughtful man, so empathetic to other cultures and so obviously liberal in his outlook, that I was surprised to learn that some critics have described him as something close to a racist. According to his detractors, he puts too much emphasis on the environment and too little on social factors, thereby implying that people cannot change their physical inheritance.
But Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that sets out to discover why Europeans conquered the Aztecs, and not the other way around, seems to me a cogent demolition of racism. Dismissing as nonsense the argument that Europeans were racially or culturally superior, the book seeks to find the real reasons.
"Why do they say it is racism?" Diamond winces, clearly upset. "I think mainly because I discussed the subject at all. But I discuss why X conquered Y because it is a big question of history." He pauses before addressing his imaginary critics: "It is perverse and weird." Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a swipe at those who suggest his books preclude choice. There is plenty of room for free will, he says. Yet he is sticking to his conviction that geography – the ease with which wild plants can be domesticated, or the prevalence of certain diseases – can have profound effects on a society's development.
"Was it a cultural choice that the Inuit up in the Arctic did not become farmers? No, it wasn't. You could not have agriculture in the Arctic," he bristles. "So it seems to me that the rise of agriculture in the modern world really does involve strong environmental influences. And if you want to call that geographical determinism, you can call it geographical determinism. Except that we are taught to react to that like you should react to wife-beating and incest with your mother: we all know it is not nice, and that it should be stopped.
"I find the easiest way to eat these is just to cut off the top and then break it into segments," he says, his focus suddenly narrowing from controversies of human agriculture to the single grapefruit before us. The abundance of food in his kitchen prompts me to return to the theme of sustainability.
"The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world," says Diamond. "That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans." The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.
Can't humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? "We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops," he says. "Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world's fresh water. So you say, 'Alright, we'll get around water by desalinating sea water.' But then there's the energy ceiling, and so on."
With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. "I'm inconsistent," he shrugs. But if we can't supply more or consume less, doesn't that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?
"No. It is our choice," he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. "If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed," he says, draining his pomegranate juice. "The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don't learn to operate sustainably."
David Pilling is the FT's Asia editor
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Jared Diamond's house
Bel Air, Los Angeles
Chilled salmon
Orzo with bacon and spinach
Mixed roast vegetables
One avocado
One grapefruit
One pomegranate lychee green tea
Lots of pomegranate juice
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde
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