The one-handed economist

I bought this 2023 book by Roma Agrawal after hearing her interviewed on a podcast. I was really excited to read about “tiny inventions that make our world work,” but I was ultimately disappointed.

My main complaint is with Agrawal’s theme of (a) telling stories about how she’s experienced a lens (“to see my baby growing in my womb”) and (b) trying to be inclusive as an apology for the dominance of Western, white, cis-males (she cites “a gender non-conforming artist, performer, poet and author” on the topic of String).

I wanted what was “on the tin” — i.e., a description of those [not-so] small inventions and how they’ve evolved in design and use. Although it’s kinda unfair that most inventors and users have been cis-males, it’s also an historic fact, so I think it would have been fine to spend more time on their ideas and struggles (often with other cis-males!) as well as providing more illustrations and diagrams.

Anyways, I got bored with the book after awhile and skimmed for interesting facts or content. I will give those examples below, with each object’s name linked to the appropriate Wikipedia page, in case you want to ready the neutral history of each invention. The wiki pages also have more diagrams and videos to show how things work.

Hmmm… I just read the first wiki page (for “nail”) and it’s a pretty close match to Agrawal’s chapter on that item. Maybe she started with wikipedia and then went to find a smith to show her how to make a nail? I’m doubting the value-add of this book even more, except for Agrawal’s personal stories (which don’t interest me)

1. Nail: If your nail bends when you hit its head, then hit harder, to force the nail into the wood before it can think of bending (!)
2. Wheel: The “double dish” wire-spoked wheel (like we see on bike tires, but also in early planes) is (a) light and strong and (b) stable because the spokes on both sides balance each other out, in terms of tension against pressure from the side. You need two sides, since one side only would collapse towards that side.
3. Spring: Clocktowers used a spring system to regulate the rate at which a weight fell, thereby powering the gears that told the time. “Clock” comes from the Latin clocca, for bell, as early “clock” towers didn’t have a face to tell the time: they only had bells.
4. Magnet: Natural permanent magnets (“lodestone”) were very rare. The first telephone converted sound into a vibration that created a current in an electro-magnet was carried “down the wire” to the receiving magnet, which then moved a diaphragm [what a crazy word! Oh, it’s Greek for separating two spaces] and reproduced the noise.
5. Lens: Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723, Delft) invented microscopes that were 30x more powerful than contemporaries, leading to the discovery of red blood cells, spermatozoa and the entire field of microscopic studies.
6. String: Its earliest use predates writing and its fragility means we don’t know when it was “invented” but probably right after the first human wrapped two vines around each other!
7. Pump: We use them everywhere to move liquids and gasses under pressure but our hearts are perhaps the most amazing (and useful!) pumps we have. They pump around 3 billion times in an 80-year lifetime, with the capacity to quadruple flow (rest to running), no need to repair, etc. Evolution is badass.

I’m glad I read the [start of the] wikipedia articles for these important inventions. Don’t bother with the book. TWO STARS.

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Here are all my reviews.

I think I was 10-12 years old when I first read this book (Le Guin 1968). I remember if fondly, especially for its emphasis on the power of someone’s “true name”

Well, in my new habit of re-reading books whose details (99%) I’ve forgotten — Moby Dick, Small is Beautiful, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — I decided to read this one again. I’m so happy I did, as the book is fantastic. It’s basically a bildungsroman (coming of age story) about Sparrowhawk (true name: Ged), a boy who journeys to become a man. I’ll leave the details for you to discover, but here are a few excerpts to illustrate Le Guin’s talents:

• “You want to work spells,” Ogion said presently, striding along. “You’ve drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
• Then with a dozen other lads he would practice with the Master Windkey at arts of wind and weather. Whole bright days of spring and early summer they spent out in Roke Bay in light catboats, practising steering by word, and stilling waves, and speaking to the world’s wind, and raising up the magewind. These are very intricate skills, and frequently Ged’s head got whacked by the swinging boom as the boat jibed under a wind suddenly blowing backwards, or his boat and another collided though they had the whole bay to navigate in, or all three boys in his boat went swimming unexpectedly as the boat was swamped by a huge, unintended wave.
• Illusion fools the beholder’s senses; it makes him see and hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
• You will find out. You must find out, or die, and worse than die…” He spoke softly and his eyes were somber as he looked at Ged. “You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do…’
• Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. Though the sea itself was a danger to him in the hard weather of the season, that danger and change and instability seemed to him a defense and chance.
• And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

FIVE STARS. Next up, The Tombs of Atuan!

Addendum (May 4): I’ve read Tombs, which is another Bildungsroman… this time for a girl/priest who traps Ged but then releases him so he can rescue her: She looked from the horror of earthquake to the man beside her, whose face she had never seen by daylight. “You held it back,” she said, and her voice piped like the wind in a reed, after that mighty bellowing and crying of the earth. “You held back the earthquake, the anger of the dark.” “We must go on,” he said, turning away from the sunrise and the ruined Tombs. “I am tired, I am cold…” He stumbled as they went, and she took his arm.

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Here are all my reviews.

KA recommended this 2022 book, and I was very much interested in the thesis of its author, Peter Zeihan, i.e., that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and that the US will come out on top.

I stopped reading it, however, as Zeihan’s pile of grandiose claims grew on shakier and shakier foundations. The issue, I think, is that Zeihan’s exuberant prose runs ahead of the logical possibilities, until you’re shouting at him to stop with the cute stuff and get serious.

So, what’s he doing? First, he’s taking “geography-demography determinism” a bit too seriously, in a way that Jared Diamond did in Guns Germs and Steel, but without Diamond’s advantage: telling a story about long passed events. Zeihan’s prognostications about the near (5-50 years?) future are far more vulnerable to critique.

Second, Zeihan’s lack of academic experience and surplus of consulting on “geo-political strategy” has left him with excess certainty and a shortage of careful analysis. I stopped many times with “but what if that’s not true.”

Third, Zeihan knows a lot about the US (where he’s based) but not enough about the rest of the world, which means his claims of American triumphalism are more default than logical. I won’t speak for Europe’s future, but the rest of the world has a lot of good things going for it.

Fourth, Zeihan predicts that the World will go either of two ways: American Imperial control or Fascist corporatism. Here he is just way over-simplifying in the face of (a) the Lilliputans ensnaring Goliath (Zeihan acknowledges America’s many failures at invasion/imperialism) and (b)  economic efficiency/competition putting paid to fascist inefficiency. Sure, I can see someone like Trump trying to do fascist imperialism (Greenland, all his crypto scams) — I just can’t see him succeeding.

Fifth, he assume everyone will still want to move to the US (preventing a demographic collapse), but there are weaknesses in that trend all over the place, due to Trump’s isolationism and racism.

Now, the main ideas in his book are that economies decline as their populations age, and that geographical resources and defenses are important when it comes to conflict. So far, so good. But the first assertion implies that GDP is the only measure of economic success (Japan’s “stagnation” is not really that bad for citizens). And the second assertion misses the many many ways that countries can collaborate (the EU) or fall apart (the US civil war). But those are his over-simplified predictions. What about the rest of the book?

I agree more with these observations:

• The world did very well post WWII under America’s “benign rule” favoring free trade and democracy. (Its Cold War shenanigans don’t get much space.)
• Global expansion must stop, due to a lack of resources (biodiversity most urgently) and growing climate chaos.
• America has tremendous resources and “potential” and it can (will?) ignore the world as things get worse. (Zeihan fails to mention how “American exceptionalism” can lead to (a) civil war and (b) shunning by other countries, both of which can destroy these advantages — as China and South Africa found, respectively.)
• America subsidized global free trade. When (if) it leaves the stage, then trade volumes — and prosperity — will fall. I think this claim is true in direction but not in magnitude, as the people have always sought trade (even before “America” existed). Trade will just cost more.

So those are my thoughts. Read these excepts from his book and see if you also see some overconfidence in his writing:

Bottom line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that’s when it is working to design. Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon

European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive

To believe that globalization will continue without an overarching enforcer and referee [the US], you must believe three things: First, that all powers in a given region will agree to do what the most potent regional power demands. That the Japanese and Taiwanese will accede to Chinese efforts to redefine the structural, economic, political, and military arrangements of East Asia. That the French, Poles, Danes, Dutch, and Hungarians (among others) will actively transfer wealth and control to Germany as the Germans age into obsolescence

I think he’s just run ahead of himself, which means that his book is more annoying than enlightening, which is why I stopped reading it after about 25 percent. THREE STARS.

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Here are all my reviews.