Review – The one-handed economist

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

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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Review: Moving Pictures

This 1990 book is the 10th in the 42-book Discworld series by Terry Prachett.

I’m only “reviewing” it here because Prachett has so many wonderful perspectives. The plot of the book is the (re-)discovery of cinema at Holy Wood, which leads to hijinks.

So here you go!

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities. At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.
Wizards were just as uncooperative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn’t have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.
Look,” said Silverfish, “the whole area’s been deserted for centuries. There’s nothing there. No people, no gods, no nothing. Just lots of sunlight and land, waiting for us. It’s our chance, lads. We’re not allowed to make magic, we can’t make gold, we can’t even make a living—so let’s make moving pictures. Let’s make history!”
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
Take up carpentry, why don’t you? Holy Wood always needs good wood butchers.
The arrival of advertising: “And the sale of sausages leads you to believe you can make better moving pictures?” said Silverfish. “Anyone can sell sausages! Isn’t that so, Victor?” “Well…” said Victor, reluctantly. No one except Dibbler could possibly sell Dibbler’s sausages. “There you are, then,” said Silverfish. “The thing is,” said Victor, “that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before.” “That’s right!” said Dibbler. He beamed at Victor. “And a man who could sell Mr. Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything,” said Victor.
In the hot breathless darkness of a clapboard shack, Ginger Withel dreamed of red carpets and cheering crowds. And a grating. She kept coming back to a grating, in the dream, where a rush of warm air blew up her skirts…
Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.
Back to the Future came out in 1985.
And the inhabitants had done something, some sort of unspeakable crime not just against Mankind or the gods but against the very nature of the universe itself, which had been so dreadful that it had sunk beneath the sea one stormy night. Only a few people had survived to carry to the barbarian peoples in the less-advanced parts of the Disc all the arts and crafts of civilization, such as usury and macrame.
The whole of life is just like watching a click [movie], he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues.
He grinned in the dark, and a sparkle of light twinkled on a tooth. Nothing created by Holy Wood magic was real for long. But you could make it real for long enough. Hooray for Holy Wood.

FIVE STARS 🙂

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Review: The Dispossessed

I read this 1974 book by Ursula K. Le Guin because i was looking for some classic, quality SciFi. This book won a slew of awards and — wow — did it deserve them!

Long story short, it’s the story of Shevek, a physicist from the moon (Anarres) of a home planet (Urras) and how their cultures compare. Anarres’s culture is anarchist, while Urras has many countries but the main one is capitalist (“Propertarians”).

I enjoyed how Le Guin really spelled out the essentials of anarchism as well as the “trap” of success in a capitalistic society where everyone, in the end, is owned.

Here are some great quotes:

Shevek sat down on the bed facing the doctor and said, “You see, I know you don’t take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one must buy things. I come to your world, I have no money, I cannot buy, therefore I should bring. But how much can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I cannot buy. If I am to be kept alive, you must give it to me. I am an Anarresti, I make the Urrasti behave like Anarressti: to give, not to sell. If you like. Of course, it is not necessary to keep me alive! I am the Beggarman, you see.”
Kimoe [an Anarresti] tried to explain status, failed, and went back to the first topic. “Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” [Shevek:] “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman.
The language Shevek spoke [Pravic], the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. This frame of words could not contain the totality of experience any more than any other, and Shevek was aware of the area left out, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Certainly he had felt that he owned Beshun, possessed her, on some of those starlit nights in the Dust. And she had thought she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Beshun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not owned him.
Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
[Shevek talking with male scientists on Urras] Do you find any women capable of original intellectual work, Dr. Shevek?” “Well, it was more that they found me. Mitis, in Northsetting, was my teacher. Also Gvarab; you know of her, I think.” “Gvarab was a woman?” Pae said in genuine surprise, and laughed. Oiie looked unconvinced and offended. “Can’t tell from your names, of course,” he said coldly. “You make a point, I suppose, of drawing no distinction between the sexes.” Shevek said mildly, “Odo was a woman.” “There you have it,” Oiie said. He did not shrug, but he very nearly shrugged. Pae looked respectful, and nodded, just as he did when old Atro maundered. Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.
Shevek was driven out into the country in hired cars, splendid machines of bizarre elegance. There were not many of them on the roads: the hire was expensive, and few people owned a car privately, because they were heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural resources or to foul the environment with waste products were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation. His guides dwelt on this with some pride. A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources.
…all the people Shevek saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe
…every year… fierce protests were made: “Why do we continue these profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians?” And cooler heads always gave the same answer: “It would cost the Urrasti more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” It is hard, however, for people who have never paid money for anything to understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace.
On arid Anarres, the communities had to scatter widely in search of resources, and few of them could be self-supporting, no matter how they cut back their notions of what is needed for support. They cut back very hard indeed, but to a minimum beneath which they would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism. They built the roads first, the houses second. The special resources and products of each region were interchanged continually with those of others, in an intricate process of balance: that balance of diversity which is the characteristic of life, of natural and social ecology.
Aside from sexual pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a dormitory. You could choose a small one or a large one, and if you didn’t like your roommates, you could move to another dormitory. Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a house wherever he liked (though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile bit of land he might find himself under heavy pressure from his neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending that they were not members of a social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function
Shevek was appalled by the examination system [on Urras], when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare [shopping] street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
But then why do people do the dirty work at all [on Anarres]? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?” “Because they are done together. . . . And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenth day it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people. . . . And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. . . . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.
Does everybody work so hard, then?” Oiie’s wife asked. “What happens to a man who just won’t cooperate?” “Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on, and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe moves on again.
It’s anywhere on Anarres [the desire to control and dominate others]. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities—anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian [anarchist] any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian.
While Shevek got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting [on Anarres]. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.”
Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver [Shevek’s partner] were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet [Le Guin is talking about Earth, not Urras] spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. . . . We survive there as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion [this was 40 years ago!] You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species.

Bottom line: “What’s the good of an anarchist society that’s afraid of anarchists?” FIVE STARS.

Addendum (6 Apr): By coincidence I read Michael Polanyi’s 1941 paper, “The Growth of Thought in Society,” in which he argues for individual freedom in pursuing (scientific) knowledge, while warning against a fascist control over what can be discussed … or discovered:

Liberal society, by maintaining various systems of dynamic order, entrusts its fate largely to forces beyond its control. Its productive system grows in unpredictable directions; and by the cultivation of the ideals to which it gives allegiance, society lets itself be guided towards new stages of enlightenment, whose implications are largely unknown. The faith that society mav confide itself to a variety of principles, which guide systems of co-operation by individual adjustment, is the faith of Liberalism, on which-as I have tried to show-the entire structure of the Liberal Society depends. From the opposite position one arrives,- by following the same analysis backwards, to all the basic principles of the Totalitarian State.

Suppose society decides to abandon the pursuit of largely uncertain ends and to take its fate wholly. into its own hands, directing its course entirely towards definite and specific immediate aims: then the structure of society must be changed accordingly. The application of the whole community to the achievement of a definite immediate aim-like winning the war, or dealing with flood, famine, epidemics, or any other emergency-must be entrusted to a State with powers to use every citizen for that definite aim, in accordance with a central scheme, or plan, formed at headquarters. No respect for law, or even humanity or truth, must interfere with the immediate good of society which is thus defined and entrusted to the State. No individual has any justification to act independently under a State which alone knows the whole plans for the future welfare of the community. There may still remain residues of private life and private freedom ; but all independent individual action for the public good, all public liberty as Liberals define it, must go. A State which is wholly responsible for the collective welfare and progress of its citizens must be dictatorial.

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Three books of travels

I enjoyed all three of these, but their “special” nature may not appeal to you. Here’s a bit on each…

Project Hail Mary (SciFi, Andy Weir 2021)

In this book, an astronaut is trying to save the world from a virus but he meets an “alien” trying to do the same for its home planet. I really liked how Weir used so many science concepts to drive the story along [*****]. Even better, he switched from the backstory to the very tense front story often enough that I didn’t get an ulcer 🙂

Wow. I’m sitting here in a spaceship in the Tau Ceti system waiting for the intelligent aliens I just met to continue our conversation … and I’m bored. Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.

I am not rested at all. Every pore of my being yells at me to go back to sleep, but I told Rocky [the alien] I’d be back in two hours and I wouldn’t want him to think humans are untrustworthy. I mean … we’re pretty untrustworthy, but I don’t want him to know that.

The Long Way (True adventure, Bernard Moitessier 1973)

This is the best sailing book I’ve read [*****]. BM entered a competition to sail around the world single handed. He did that, but didn’t stop until he had gone another “half turn” around. He didn’t want to win the prize in the end, as he just loved being one with the sea. He’s an amazing, poetic writer. His technical annexes are very detailed. I am sure that I would never make such a trip (I’d prefer to crew with many others), but anyone who thinks about long distance sailing or escaping from “civilization” would love this book!

And I had the feeling, again almost physically, that my hand drew them [sea birds] more than the cheese. I wanted to caress them, at least to try. But I did not dare; maybe it was too soon. With a clumsy and premature gesture I risked breaking something very fragile. Wait a while longer, don’t rush things, don’t force things. Wait until the waves of friendship, made of invisible vibrations, reach their full maturity. You can spoil everything, trying to go faster than nature…

For nearly a week the barograph line has been full of little jerks and tremors, as if the gods of the Indian Ocean were restraining their anger. Some say ‘Let’s clobber him.’ Others try to hold them back: ‘Come on, leave the little red and white boat alone. Can’t you see he’s not about to eat your precious icebergs!’ And the gods argue back and forth up there, throwing cirrus, halos and rainbows around.

My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

I ate nothing this morning, nothing at noon. Not from laziness or nerves; I just didn’t feel like it. Penguins and seals go for long periods without food in the mating season, other animals do the same in the great migrations. And deep within himself man may carry the same instinct to leave food aside, as animals do in the solemn moments of their lives. I watch this fantastic sea, breathe in its spray, and feel blossoming here in the wind and space something that needs the immensity of the universe to come to fruition.

If we listened to people like you, more or less vagabonds and barefoot tramps, we would not have got beyond the bicycle.’ ‘That’s just it; we would ride bikes in the cities, there wouldn’t be those thousands of cars with hard, closed people all alone in them, we would see youngsters arm in arm, hear laughter and singing, see nice things in people’s faces; joy and love would be reborn everywhere, birds would return to the few trees left in our streets and we would replant the trees the Monster killed. Then we would feel real shadows and real colours and real sounds; our cities would get their souls back, and people too.’ And I know all that is no dream, everything beautiful and good that men have done they built with their dreams . . . but back there, the Monster has taken over for men, it dreams in our place. It would have us believe that man is the centre of the universe, that all rights are his on the pretense that he invented the steam engine and lots of other machines, and that he will someday reach the stars if he just hurries a little before the next bomb. Nothing to worry about there, our hurrying suits the Monster just fine . . . he helps us hurry . . . time is short . . . hardly any time left.

Alas yes, money . . . for all our picking up butts and living with a reasonable amount of brains, more or less money is necessary, depending on one’s temperament. In any case, one thing is certain: one can go very far and lead an interesting life with very little money to start, because one always makes out once underway—provided one is underway.

King Solomon’s Mines (Adventure fiction, H. Rider Haggard, 1885)

This book launched the entire genre of “boys adventures” that showed up in later books and movies (e.g., Indiana Jones). It’s very dated in terms of its non-PC language regarding Africans and women, but it’s also gives an interesting view into Victorian culture [****]. The plot — white men venturing into the lands of savages to recover (white) King Solomon’s treasures — is silly but it wasn’t so crazy at the time, given how much of Africa was blank on the map. Oh, and the animal killing is a lot less offensive when you remember that the animals had a better chance to kill men back then.

It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don’t like that. This is by the way.

For to my mind, however beautiful a view may be, it requires the presence of man to make it complete, but perhaps that is because I have lived so much in the wilderness, and therefore know the value of civilisation, though to be sure it drives away the game

But whether you are right or wrong, I may as well tell you at once that I am going through with it to the end, sweet or bitter. If we are going to be knocked on the head, all I have to say is that I hope we shall get a little shooting first, eh, Good?” “Yes, yes,” put in the captain. “We have all three of us been accustomed to face danger, and hold our lives in our hands in various ways, so it is no good turning back now.” “And now I vote we go down to the saloon and take an observation, just for luck, you know.” And we did—through the bottom of a tumbler.

With a scream of pain the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing his huge foot on to his body about the middle, twined his trunk round his upper part and tore him in two. We rushed up mad with horror, and fired again, and again, and presently the elephant fell upon the fragments of the Zulu. As for Good, he got up and wrung his hands over the brave man who had given his life to save him, and myself, though an old hand, I felt a lump in my throat. Umbopa stood and contemplated the huge dead elephant and the mangled remains of poor Khiva [the Zulu]. “Ah well,” he said presently, “he is dead, but he died like a man.”

“Listen! What is Life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner. I will go with thee across the desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the ground on the way, my father.” He paused awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of rhetorical eloquence which Zulus sometimes indulge in, and which to my mind, full as they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no means devoid of poetic instinct and of intellectual power.

I am, to be honest, a bit of a coward, and certainly in no way given to fighting, though, somehow, it has often been my lot to get into unpleasant positions, and to be obliged to shed man’s blood. But I have always hated it, and kept my own blood as undiminished in quantity as possible, sometimes by a judicious use of my heels. At this moment, however, for the first time in my life, I felt my bosom burn with martial ardour. Warlike fragments from the “Ingoldsby Legends,” together with numbers of sanguinary verses from the Old Testament, sprang up in my brain like mushrooms in the dark; my blood, which hitherto had been half-frozen with horror, went beating through my veins, and there came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare not. I glanced round at the serried ranks of warriors behind us, and somehow, all in an instant, began to wonder if my face looked like theirs. There they stood, their heads craned forward over their shields, the hands twitching, the lips apart, the fierce features instinct with the hungry lust of battle, and in the eyes a look like the glare of a bloodhound when he sights his quarry.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Small is Beautiful

E.F. (Ernst Friedrich) Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered in 1973.

I read the book years ago [Whoops! Here’s my 2009 review, which is much shorter!] and even used it as “the text” for my microeconomics course ten years ago, but I had not re-read it for awhile. I’m glad that I did, as the book is (a) interesting and provocative (=you didn’t think of this) at the same time as (b) it makes a number of dated or mistaken assertions. So the book is a mix of enduring (never dying?) truth and provincial fetish.

The book has four parts: The Modern World, Resources, the Third World, and Organization and Ownership. In each we see a side of EFS’s thoughts, i.e., the modern world’s problem with wasteful consumption (in contrast with Buddhist satisfaction with quality), the over-use of non-renewable resources (coal, oil, nuclear) and under-emphasis on renewables (water, wood, people), and a “soft path” of development at an appropriate scale and technology — ideas that EFS borrowed directly from Gandhi’s ideas of Swadeshi (self-reliance) — in contrast with producing commodities on the frontiers of technology and scale to compete in global markets.

The main point of this book — and the reason that I find it so interesting — is that EFS does not directly criticize “large is ugly” over-consumption of vast quantities of goods and inputs. He instead argues that we should get our happiness from adding more quality to our lives. Put differently, he favors getting the most from limited means over consuming everything you can.

Such a change in perspective would require one of two changes of heart: Either “society” changes is preferences from quantity to quality or the government limits society’s consumption. The first change is bottom-up, voluntary, organic and slow in comparison to the second, but it is easier from a political perspective. The second change wold “fix everything, overnight,” but it’s hard to think of any examples of a government that limits consumption while remaining in power. (“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” — J-C. Junker, 2008.)

What about Bhutan? It’s pretty sustainable due to its natural resources and conservation policies but less than half of its 800,000 citizens (=Amsterdam’s population) are “happy’ — an important caveat for a Buddhist (!) country that pursues “Gross National Happiness” over GDP.

Sale poster from 1908 (today, she’d have a phone in her hand)

So the book is thought-provoking, but not exactly taking the world by storm now… or in the 52 years since it was published. I’m a bit sad about that, because I think the book has a lot of wisdom, but consumption is popular (see 117 year old advert, left).

Let’s get into some of EFS’s observations:

The world did not (and still does not) have enough resources to “bring the poor” up to the levels of rich consumption. We’re talking 14 times more energy per capita, and so on. EFS says it clearly: we can’t grow without limit, either due to resource constraints or the resulting pollution impact.
EFS argues instead for cheap, small-scale production that humans can use creatively. He also warns that economists leave “free” goods (air, water, etc.) out of calculations that justify their consumption, which is NOT free!
Buddhist economics is not just about prioritizing quality of quantity. It also takes work as a good thing, as a means of self-fulfillment, whereas mainstream economics takes it as a “bad” to be minimized (paradise is where everyone uses universal basic income to pay for 24/7 consumption).
“Development,” then does not mean consuming as much as “obtaining the maximum of well being with a minimum of consumption” [p48]. This definition makes a lot of sense when you consider the resources involved in consumption and how those resources (non-renewable, but also renewables that are “mined”) are gone once we consume them. EFS makes the obvious but often forgotten point that we can only consume “income” from Nature. If we consume Nature itself, then we will permanently lose that income.
EFS talks a lot about scale, which is why the book has Small in the title. Thus, he favors smaller-scale production and smaller markets that are shared by a smaller group of people who live in a smaller area. These ideas align with Gandhi’s notions even as they contradict basic economic recommendations of specialization, gains from trade and interlinking markets. I can see both sides on this debate, but I side with EFS at the moment, as I think we’ve gone too far with global drop-shipping, pollution exports, and supply chains that value cheap over cheerful.
In Part II, EFS begins with Education, which is NOT the solution to everything but a mixed blessing. He uses the jargon of convergent problems that can be solved and divergent problems that cannot (taking roughly the same positions as “objective” and “subjective,” respectively) to point out that too much science and too little poetry can lead to an “education” that delivers material progress but spiritual death. It’s useful to remember at this point that the book came out at the height of hippie consciousness — just before a majority of those hippies turned into yuppies of the “I’ve got mine, fuck you” variety.
His next chapter — Land — highlights the contradiction of a farmer (“produce as much as possible, at the lowest cost”) who is also a human (“cherish the land that gives you life and joy”) — a schizophrenia that has only deepened since 1973. He goes on to lament the depopulation of rural areas as newly ~~freed~~ fired workers exchange their families and communities for wage slavery in the Satanic Mills.
In Resources for Industry, EFS “does the math” to show how the world cannot possibly produce (and consume) at American levels, due to the fact that “five percent of the world’s population is consuming forty percent of the world’s resources.” Fair point.

By the way, it bears repeating that the sustainability (definition: “it can go on, indefinitely”) that we find in Nature emerges from an endless struggle for survival, as each species expands, evolves and fights and dies in a quest for the resources in various ecological niches. Humans have escaped that competition by taking space and life from other species. We are no longer held back by natural predators or threats. The only thing that would limit or stop us from dominating everything — we now control 95 percent of the Earth’s land biomass — is our conscious decision to limit ourselves. EFS and a few others have made that decision; the vast majority of the rich people (and would-be rich people) who should be making those decisions have not. Maybe that’s a collective action problem (if I don’t consume, you will), but that doesn’t make it any less of a failure — or a big step towards self-genocide.

I was surprised to read so much in favor of coal (a local fuel to the UK, and thus “small”) and so much against nuclear (radioactive waste will kill us forever), but (a) I didn’t know that EFS worked for Coal Britain and (b) he didn’t know how dangerous GHG emissions would be to our survival. That said, he’s right to worry about the impacts of “more, cheaper energy” on our ecosystems and societies. Example: The Dutch used to heat one room with coal; when they found natural gas, they heated the entire home. They were probably healthier (indoor air pollution), but they were probably not happier (it’s transitional), and their “footprint” got way bigger!
In Technology with a Human Face, EFS makes his case for “intermediate” technology that is appropriate for human hands (in size) and minds (in comprehension. He points out that the vast majority of workers do not actually make anything tangible. Many of us work with ideas, administration or management, with a good share in that group doing bullshit jobs that are even less meaningful. EFS says that our dependency on technology and complexity is not just unsustainable but also demeaning to our human spirit. He posits a “first law of economics” as “the amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs” [p124]. He’s got a point [pdf].
In Part III (Development), EFS explains (a) why employment is more important than output efficiency (agreed!) and (b) how poorer countries should embrace “intermediate technology” — rather than “high” technology — in order to employ as many locals as possible, making simple cheap products for other locals. Jane Jacobs (1969) explained why this is a good idea, in terms of learning-by-doing and expanding into under-appreciated niches (read my review).
EFS is right to worry about rural areas dying as people migrate to cities in search of work. That’s why he (a) opposes aid from rich countries modeled on “do like us” and (b) suggests that rural areas are better served by businesses working with intermediate technology. (He doesn’t have a lot of good words for foreign aid workers.)
In The Problem of Unemployment in India (a lecture that joins as a chapter), he further develops these themes, warning his audience against pursuing expensive capital-intensive factories over, say, planting trees. Everyone can work if the work matches their skills and education.
In Part IV (Organization and Ownership), EFS returns to several important themes, i.e., the unpredictability of life (and thus need for flexibility), the value of scenarios over forecasts (since life is non-linear), and the need for decentralization (since top-down mostly fails). I agree with his repeated warnings against larger organizations, extra management layers, etc., since smaller groups are far more effective at organizing and implementing plans.
In his chapters on Ownership, Socialization and New Patterns of Ownership, EFS argues against private ownership of larger enterprises, mostly due to (a) their concentration of financial power and (b) their pursuit of profit over other social values. I have issues with this view, since the private owner (+ shareholders) has a stronger incentive to innovate and create value (profits!) relative to a state-appointed manager. I agree with him about limiting market power as well as negative externalities, but abuses can also happen when the state runs things. A weak state would be bad at regulation as well as running a large enterprise. A strong state can do both, but “strong” does not mean “good” as far as citizens are concerned.
He goes on to call for fifty percent public ownership of larger companies, to “represent the contribution of the public to the company’s success.” While I agree with his “you didn’t build that” point as well as the need to tax large profits, I worry (again!) about the State as owner deciding that a company should do X or not do Y. President Xi is trying to do a lot of this in China right now, and it seems he’s getting a lot more bureaucracy and bullshit and a lot less value added. OTOH, he doesn’t care about the private sector, so that may be a price he’s willing inflict on “his” people.
He ends by repeating his call for less materialism and more prudence, i.e., to make the most of what you have without being greedy for more.

I give this book FIVE stars for its many provocative — and often right! — suggestions of how to live happily and sustainably on our fragile planet.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Think Again

I got this 2021 book after hearing an interview with its author, Adam Grant, who sounded really sensible… for a psychologist (I kid!)

Anyways, it was far better — in terms of insights and techniques — than I planned, so I made far too many notes. I will give the highlights below, but do also consider this book as an interesting companion to Supercommunicators (my review).

But before I go on, let me point you to three “cheat sheets” (now called “sketchnotes”?) that summaries some of the book’s major themes in pictures (and words — you still need to read!)

Four thinking modes (preacher, politician, prosecutor vs scientist) [bup]
Three types of rethinking (individual, interpersonal, collective) [bup]
Just a lot of related ideas on the book [bup]

So, to the notes:

Rethinking and unlearning is more important than raw intelligence. “When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this seizing and freezing. We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.”
Sometimes we need to confront our identity before we can rethink. “A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity….rethinking who you are appears to become mentally healthy—as long as you can tell a coherent story about how you got from past to present you.”
Three modes: “We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents.”
A better mode: “We move into scientist mode when we’re searching for the truth: we run experiments to test hypotheses and discover knowledge… When second and third graders learned about “doing science” rather than “being scientists,” they were more excited about pursuing science. Becoming a scientist might seem out of reach, but the act of experimenting is something we can all try out. Even prekindergarten students express more interest in science when it’s presented as something we do rather than someone we are.”
Entrepreneurs trained to think like scientists (hypothesis, test, analysis, update) made far more money than the control group because they were willing to discard old ways and try new ways of doing things.
“Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs. [How?] One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see.”
“In preacher mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity. In prosecutor mode, allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat; in scientist mode, it’s a step toward the truth.”
“People who scored the lowest on an emotional intelligence test weren’t just the most likely to overestimate their skills. They were also the most likely to dismiss their scores as inaccurate or irrelevant—and the least likely to invest in coaching or self-improvement… When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence.”
Are you persistent or stubborn? “You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.”
“Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life—they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity… You want the doctor whose identity is protecting health, the teacher whose identity is helping students learn, and the police chief whose identity is promoting safety and justice. When they define themselves by values rather than opinions, they buy themselves the flexibility to update their practices in light of new evidence.”
“When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen to prove it false. Then keep track of your views so you can see when you were right, when you were wrong, and how your thinking has evolved. `I started out just wanting to prove myself,’ Jean-Pierre says. `Now I want to improve myself—to see how good I can get.'”
“Relationship conflict is generally bad for performance, but some task conflict can be beneficial…. when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships.”
“Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses… The ideal members of a challenge network are disagreeable, because they’re fearless about questioning the way things have always been done and holding us accountable for thinking again. There’s evidence that disagreeable people speak up more frequently—especially when leaders aren’t receptive—and foster more task conflict.”
“Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker.”
This sentence reminds me of me: “Agreeableness is about seeking social harmony, not cognitive consensus. It’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Although I’m terrified of hurting other people’s feelings, when it comes to challenging their thoughts, I have no fear. In fact, when I argue with someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother.”
“Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you…When social scientists asked people why they favor particular policies on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in practice—or how they’d explain them to an expert—activated a rethinking cycle.”
“Skilled negotiators rarely went on offense or defense. Instead, they expressed curiosity with questions like “So you don’t see any merit in this proposal at all?” … We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse to change ours. We can demonstrate openness by acknowledging where we agree with our critics and even what we’ve learned from them. Then, when we ask what views they might be willing to revise, we’re not hypocrites.”
How to find common ground? Rather than attack the straw-man version of your opponent’s argument, state their “steel man” (strongest) points. When you agree with someone’s point, then you give them the chance to (a) agree with you and (b) question themselves.
Don’t fight with the other person’s views, but treat the discussion like a dance in which you try to understand their emotion rather than fighting it. “In a heated argument, you can always stop and ask, “What evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then there’s no point in continuing the debate.”
I have said that I have “strong opinions, weakly held.” I interpret this as a sign of willingness to change my mind, but some people react more to “strong” than “weakly” so it’s better to include uncertainty, i.e., “strong opinions, open to updates” (my words). More from AG: “An informed audience is going to spot the holes in our case anyway. We might as well get credit for having the humility to look for them, the foresight to spot them, and the integrity to acknowledge them”
“Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell reflected. “From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” This reaction is known as the overview effect”
How do you get rabid sports fans to stop attacking “the enemy”? Remind them of how arbitrary their anger is. (What if you were born in New York rather than Boston? Would you be a fucking idiot for supporting the Yankees?)
“People gain humility when they reflect on how different circumstances could have led them to different beliefs. They might conclude that some of their past convictions had been too simplistic and begin to question some of their negative views. That doubt could leave them more curious about groups they’ve stereotyped, and they might end up discovering some unexpected commonalities.”
“Motivational interviewing starts with an attitude of humility and curiosity. We don’t know what might motivate someone else to change, but we’re genuinely eager to find out. The goal isn’t to tell people what to do; it’s to help them break out of overconfidence cycles and see new possibilities. Our role is to hold up a mirror so they can see themselves more clearly, and then empower them to examine their beliefs and behaviors. That can activate a rethinking cycle, in which people approach their own views more scientifically. They develop more humility about their knowledge, doubt in their convictions, and curiosity about alternative points of view. The process of motivational interviewing involves three key techniques:
- Asking open-ended questions
- Engaging in reflective listening
- Affirming the person’s desire and ability to change.”
“When we try to convince people to think again, our first instinct is usually to start talking. Yet the most effective way to help others open their minds is often to listen…Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention.”
“Sustain talk is commentary about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is referencing a desire, ability, need, or commitment to make adjustments. When contemplating a change, many people are ambivalent—they have some reasons to consider it but also some reasons to stay the course. Miller and Rollnick suggest asking about and listening for change talk, and then posing some questions about why and how they might change.”
“There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition points: summarizing. The idea is to explain your understanding of other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and possible next steps. The objective is not to be a leader or a follower, but a guide.” Also see “looping to understand” in my Supercommunicators review.
Rather than present a dispute as right or wrong, black or white, allow for the reality of a middle ground, a gray area. “An antidote to this [0/1] proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism.”
“The greater the distance between us and an adversary, the more likely we are to oversimplify their actual motives and invent explanations that stray far from their reality. What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views.”
“Many teachers don’t do enough to encourage students to question themselves and one another… extraordinary educators foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity.”
“Some teachers send students out to interview people with whom they disagree. The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to consider different views and argue productively about them.”
“Lectures… are not enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.”
Senior Penn students who wrote letters to their younger selves didn’t just give good advice; they had an excuse to re-think — and maybe change — some of their habits. “The students encouraged their younger selves to stay open to different majors, instead of declaring the first one that erased their uncertainty. To be less obsessed with grades, and more focused on relationships. To explore different career possibilities, rather than committing too soon to the one that promised the most pay or prestige.”
“When students confront complex problems, they often feel confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.”
Do more than one draft… of a letter, an essay, a drawing, a jump. Drafts give us space to improve without putting pressure on doing it right or perfectly the first time. They also improve with each revision because we learn by doing. You can’t write a perfect final draft without a lot of imperfect earlier drafts.
“We randomly assigned some managers to ask their teams for constructive criticism. [it didn’t go well] … Another group of managers shared their past experiences with receiving feedback and their future development goals. We advised them to tell their teams about a time when they benefited from constructive criticism and to identify the areas that they were working to improve now. By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public commitment to remain open to feedback.”
“It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves”
“It isn’t until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to reexamine their practices… When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment.” And that’s what happened to me (what I did) when my boat was sinking — doubled down, instead of stepping back. Since then, I have tried to step back more quickly from (a) perfection (90% of good enough) and (b) confidence (maybe I don’t know what I am doing… what do you think?)
“Gritty mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they’re determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit. There’s a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.”
Paraphrasing… “Career checkup questions can periodically activate rethinking cycles. Ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to consider a pivot? A CC helps you maintain humility about you ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts, and stay curious enough about new possibilities or previously discarded ones.”
“Data suggesting that meaning is healthier than happiness, and that people who look for purpose in their work are more successful in pursuing their passions—and less likely to quit their jobs—than those who look for joy.”
“Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

[Adam’s] Bottom Line: “It takes humility to reconsider our past commitments, doubt to question our present decisions, and curiosity to reimagine our future plans. What we discover along the way can free us from the shackles of our familiar surroundings and our former selves. Rethinking liberates us to do more than update our knowledge and opinions—it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling life.”

Here are 30 tips for thinking again [pdf]

I give this book FIVE stars. Don’t just read it — use it in your life.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Supercommunicators

I read this 2024 book after hearing an interview with Charles Duhigg. His main points were (a) he was embarrassed that he was not as good a communicator as he thought he was and (b) that there are techniques to improve communication.

Somewhat coincidentally, I’ve recently decided to put more time into promoting communication among people (e.g., getting my students/colleagues to talk with each other), so this book is even more interesting to me now than when I started to read it 🙂

Here are my notes:

One key idea is that “many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds.” A lot of communication failures come from two sides talking past each other because one person is having an emotional conversation while the other focuses on their identity (or deciding what’s for dinner!)
- Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.
- …high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions. They subtly reflected shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When someone got serious, they matched that seriousness. When a discussion went light, they were the first to play along. They changed their minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by their groupmates.
Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions, should be to have a “learning conversation.” Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.
- Here are four rules to a learning conversation:
  Rule One: Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring.
  Rule Two: Share your goals, and ask what others are seeking.
  Rule Three: Ask about others’ feelings, and share your own.
  Rule Four: Explore if identities are important to this discussion.
- One: When a student comes to a teacher upset, for instance, the teacher might ask: “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”
- Two: How are we going to make choices together… Are we going to make decisions through analysis and reason, or through empathy and narratives?
The correct approach isn’t trying to put yourself in “someone else’s shoes.” That, after all, is impossible. Rather, maybe the best you can do is ask questions.
- Ask about people’s lives, about what they’re feeling, about their hopes and fears, and then listen for their struggles, disappointments, joys, and ambitions.
- Asking about someone’s beliefs or values (“How’d you decide to become a teacher?”).
- Asking someone to make a judgment (“Are you glad you went to law school?”).
- Asking about someone’s experiences (“What was it like to visit Europe?”)
- These kinds of questions don’t feel intrusive—asking “How’d you decide to become a teacher?” doesn’t seem overly personal—but it’s an invitation for someone to share their beliefs about education, or what they value in a job. “Are you glad you went to law school?” invites someone to reflect on their choices, rather than simply describing their work.
The difference between a shallow question and one that sparks an opportunity for emotional connection is vulnerability. And vulnerability is what makes How Do We Feel? so powerful.
- Questions about facts (“Where do you live?” “What college did you attend?”) are often conversational dead-ends. They don’t draw out values or experiences. They don’t invite vulnerability. However, those same inquiries, recast slightly (“What do you like about where you live?” “What was your favorite part of college?”), invite others to share their preferences, beliefs, and values, and to describe experiences that caused them to grow or change. Those questions make emotional replies easier, and they practically beg the questioner to reciprocate—to divulge, in return, why they live in this neighborhood, what they enjoyed about college—until everyone is drawn in, asking and answering back and forth.
- The researchers found that “questioners assumed that asking sensitive questions would make their conversation partners uncomfortable and would damage their relationships. But in fact, we consistently found that askers were wrong on both fronts.” Asking deep questions is easier than most people realize, and more rewarding than we expect.
- Try 36 Questions for Increasing Closeness with a friend or family member.
When someone proves they’re listening it creates “a sense of psychological safety because [the listener] instills a confidence in the speaker that at least their arguments will receive full consideration and will, thus, be evaluated based on their real worth.” When people believe that others are trying to understand their perspectives, they become more trusting, more willing “to express their thoughts and ideas.” The “sense of safety, value and acceptance” that comes from believing a partner is genuinely listening makes us more willing to reveal our own vulnerabilities and uncertainties. If you want someone to expose their emotions, the most important step is convincing them you are listening closely to what they say.
- So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said. And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right.
- We all crave control, of course. And while there are many factors that determine if a romantic relationship succeeds or flounders, one is whether the relationship makes us feel more in control of our happiness, or less. It is natural for couples to wrestle over control in a relationship; it’s part of working out how to balance each person’s needs, wants, roles, and responsibilities. But as the researchers watched their videotapes, they noticed a previously overlooked dynamic: During fights, happy and unhappy couples seemed to approach control very differently.
- Among happy couples, however, the desire for control emerged quite differently. Rather than trying to control the other person, happy couples tended to focus, instead, on controlling themselves, their environment, and the conflict itself.
- One advantage of focusing on these three things—controlling oneself, the environment, and the boundaries of the conflict—is that it allowed happy spouses to find things they could control together. They were still fighting. They still disagreed. But, when it came to control, they were on the same side of the table.
- This explains why looping for understanding is so powerful: When you prove to someone you are listening, you are, in effect, giving them some control over the conversation. This is also why the matching principle is so effective: When we follow someone else’s lead and become emotional when they are emotional, or practical when they have signaled a practical mindset, we are sharing control over how a dialogue flows.
- On Facebook, people kept trying to control one another. These struggles for control weren’t the only thing disrupting conversations—but when they emerged, they tore dialogues apart. Some Facebook participants, for instance, tried to control what others were allowed to say, which opinions were permitted, what emotions could be expressed: “It’s ridiculous to say you’re scared because your neighbor owns a gun,” one person told another. “There’s no way you should feel that way.”
- Sometimes people don’t know how to listen. They think listening means debating, and if you let someone else make a good point, you’re doing something wrong. But listening means letting someone else tell their story and then, even if you don’t agree with them, trying to understand why they feel that way
The desire for belonging is at the core of the Who Are We? conversation, which occurs whenever we talk about our connections within society. When we discuss the latest organizational gossip (“I hear everyone in accounting is going to get laid off”) or signal an affiliation (“We’re Knicks fans in this family”) or figure out social linkages (“You went to Berkeley? Do you know Troy?”) or emphasize social dissimilarities (“As a Black woman, I see this differently than you”), we’re engaging in a Who Are We? conversation.
- It’s crucial, in a Who Are We? conversation, to remind ourselves that we all possess multiple identities: We are parents but also siblings; experts in some topics and novices in others; friends and coworkers and people who love dogs but hate to jog. We are all of these simultaneously, so no one stereotype describes us fully. We all contain multitudes that are just waiting to be expressed. This means that a Who Are We? discussion might need to be more meandering and exploratory. Or it might need to go deep and invite others to talk about where they come from, how they see themselves, how the prejudices they confront—racism, sexism, the expectations of parents and communities—have impacted their lives.
- First, try to draw out your conversational partners’ multiple identities. It’s important to remind everyone that we all contain multitudes; none of us is one-dimensional. Acknowledging those complexities during a conversation helps disrupt the stereotypes within our heads. Second, try to ensure everyone is on equal footing. Don’t offer unsolicited advice or trumpet your wealth or connections. Seek out topics where everyone has some experience and knowledge, or everyone is a novice. Encourage the quiet to speak and the talkative to listen, so everyone is participating. Finally, look for social similarities that already exist. We do this naturally when we meet someone new and start searching for people we know in common. But it is important to take those connections a step further and make our commonalities more salient. Our similarities become powerful when they are rooted in something meaningful: We may both be friends with Jim, but that’s not much of a connection—until we start talking about what his friendship means to us, how Jim is an important part of both our lives.
- These kinds of comments sparked irritation because the listeners had been assigned to a group (the wealthy snobs, the selfish Republicans, the undeserving college students) they didn’t identify with. Or, they were denied membership in a group (people who understand how the law works, people who sympathize with children) where they felt they rightfully belonged. So the listener, offended, would become defensive as their sense of self—their identity—was attacked. In psychology, this is known as identity threat, and it is deeply corrosive to communication.
- Put differently, the researchers hypothesized that nudging participants to think, just a little harder, about how a Who Are We? conversation will unfold, before it starts, might make identity threats a bit less threatening. Who will speak first? (Studies suggest the person with the least power should begin.) What kinds of emotions should we anticipate? (If we prepare for discomfort and tension, we make them easier to withstand.) What obstacles should we expect? When they emerge, what will we do? Most important, what benefits do we expect will emerge from this dialogue, and are they worth the risks?
- When conversations focus on creating belonging for everyone, as well as diversity and inclusion, “you’re inviting people to participate and learn, to take responsibility for improving things.” It is important to note that these kinds of discussions will almost never be perfect. But perfection is not the goal. “Most of the work is about gaining awareness of yourself, your culture, and the culture of others”… to recognize our own biases.

These notes are not nearly as useful as reading the book and its many examples. FIVE STARS.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Bureaucracy

Ludwig van Mises published this short book in 1944, around the same time as Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published but before Hayek’s 1945 article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” These other references are important because (a) Mises was Hayek’s teacher and (b) both were heavily involved in the “calculation debate” in which they (as non-planners who supported the “emergent order” of markets) opposed the planners in the USSR and other countries who wanted “scientific management.”

This book’s place in that debate is even more obvious when you read what Mises writes, in his relentless, yet clear style:

The main issue in present-day social and political conflicts is whether or not man should give away freedom, private initiative, and individual responsibility and surrender to the guardianship of a gigantic apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the socialist state. Subtle.
But now, for many years and especially since the appearance of the New Deal, powerful forces are on the point of substituting for this old and well-tried democratic system the tyrannical rule of an irresponsible and arbitrary bureaucracy… Government commissions and bureaus issue decrees and regulations undertaking the management and direction of every aspect of the citizens’ lives. Not only do they regulate matters which hitherto have been left to the discretion of the individual; they do not shrink from decreeing what is virtually a repeal of duly enacted laws. By means of this quasilegislation the bureaus usurp the power to decide many important matters according to their own judgment of the merits of each case, that is, quite arbitrarily. Whelp, the Supreme Court just did a number on THAT power, but it tool them 80 years?
Powerful political parties and pressure groups are fervently asking for public control of all economic activities, for thorough government planning, and for the nationalization of business. They aim at full government control of education and at the socialization of the medical profession. There is no sphere of human activity that they would not be prepared to subordinate to regimentation by the authorities. In their eyes, state control is the panacea for all ills. These enthusiastic advocates of government omnipotence are very modest in the appraisal of the role they themselves play in the evolution toward totalitarianism. While I agree that this vision is scary, I wonder if/when Mises will exclude any sort of “bureaucracy” from critique. (Yep. See #10.)
Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individual’s life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management. There is no compromise possible between these two systems. Sweden (and others) have entered the chat.
But which capitalism? The present-day champions of free enterprise are romantics like the eulogists of the medieval arts and crafts. They are entirely mistaken in attributing to mammoth corporations the qualities which once were the excellence of small or medium-size business. There cannot be any question of breaking up the big aggregates into smaller units. On the contrary, the tendency toward a further concentration of economic power will prevail. Monopolized big business will congeal into rigid bureaucratism. Its managers, responsible to nobody, will become a hereditary aristocracy; the governments will become mere puppets of an omnipotent business clique. Ahh, not that kind!
A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made. He does not owe anything to the favor of those in power. But, on the other hand, the government can bring about conditions which paralyze the efforts of a creative spirit and prevent him from rendering useful services to the community. Channeling Ayn Rand (1943)?
The modern state is built upon the ruins of feudalism. It substituted bureaucratic management of public affairs for the supremacy of a multitude of petty princes and counts… Totalitarianism is much more than mere bureaucracy. It is the subordination of every individual’s whole life, work, and leisure, to the orders of those in power and office. It is the reduction of man to a cog in an all-embracing machine of compulsion and coercion. It forces the individual to renounce any activity of which the government does not approve. It tolerates no expression of dissent. It is the transformation of society into a strictly disciplined labor-army—as the advocates of socialism say—or into a penitentiary—as its opponents say… Modern socialism… is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the “comrade” is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in.
The preëminence of the capitalist system consists in the fact that it is the only system of social coöperation and division of labor which makes it possible to apply a method of reckoning and computation in planning new projects and appraising the usefulness of the operation of those plants, farms, and workshops already working. The impracticability of all schemes of socialism and central planning is to be seen in the impossibility of any kind of economic calculation under conditions in which there is no private ownership of the means of production and consequently no market prices for these factors. Hayek said the same a year later, but here’s a good example of the zeitgeist. Mises continues for several pages on this theme, highlighting the need for “groping” for profits: The actual world is a world of permanent change. Population figures, tastes, and wants, the supply of factors of production and technological methods are in a ceaseless flux. In such a state of affairs there is need for a continuous adjustment of production to the change in conditions. This is where the entrepreneur comes in.
What’s needed is competition! Consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to be served as well as possible. And the working of the capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders issued by the consumers… The price of labor is a market phenomenon determined by the consumers’ demands for goods and services. Virtually every employer is always in search of cheaper labor and every employee in search of a job with higher remuneration.
Bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad. It is a method of management which can be applied in different spheres of human activity. There is a field, namely, the handling of the apparatus of government, in which bureaucratic methods are required by necessity. What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied. This expansion is the unavoidable consequence of the progressive restriction of the individual citizen’s freedom, of the inherent trend of present-day economic and social policies toward the substitution of government control for private initiative. People blame bureaucracy, but what they really have in mind are the endeavors to make the state socialist and totalitarian.
Now, to definitions: In public administration there is no market price for achievements. This makes it indispensable to operate public offices according to principles entirely different from those applied under the profit motive… Now we are in a position to provide a definition of bureaucratic management: Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs the result of which has no cash value on the market. And Public Choice — a term dating from the 1940s — has a lot to say about how those principles (the ones incongruent with the profit motive) are abused by bureaucrats favoring themselves over citizens.
Homo bureaucratis? The majority were tied up with the bureaus for life. They developed a character peculiar to their permanent removal from the world of profit-seeking business. Their intellectual horizon was the hierarchy and its rules and regulations… In a properly arranged civil-service system the promotion to higher ranks depends primarily on seniority. The heads of the bureaus are for the most part old men who know that after a few years they will be retired. Having spent the greater part of their lives in subordinate positions, they have lost vigor and initiative. They shun innovations and improvements. They look on every project for reform as a disturbance of their quiet. Thus, my proposal for a time limit for bureaucrats.
Ahhh…. the sins of a bureaucratic monopoly: If a government-owned enterprise operates at a loss or with a part only of the profit which it could attain if it were conducted solely according to the profit motive, the falling off affects the budget and thereby the taxpayers. If, for instance, a city-owned transportation system charges the customers so low a fare that the costs of the operation cannot be covered, the taxpayers are virtually subsidizing those riding the trains. Or a city-owned parking system? Indeed.
And why do they fail? Missing profit motive, wrong prices, weak competition? It is precisely the efficient and honest manager [of a state enterprise] who will try to make the services of his outfit as good as possible. But as he is not restrained by any considerations of financial success, the costs involved would place a heavy burden on the public funds. He would become a sort of irresponsible spender of the taxpayers’ money. As this is out of the question, the government must give attention to many details of the management. It must define in a precise way the quality and the quantity of the services to be rendered and the commodities to be sold…. The criterion of good [bureaucratic] management is not the approval of the customers resulting in an excess of revenue over costs but the strict obedience to a set of bureaucratic rules.
Mises against fascists: The good is embodied in the great god State, the materialization of the eternal idea of morality, and the bad in the “rugged individualism” of selfish men. In this antagonism the State is always right and the individual always wrong. The State is the representative of the commonweal, of justice, civilization, and superior wisdom. The individual is a poor wretch, a vicious fool. When a German says “der Staat” or when a Marxian says “society,” they are overwhelmed by reverential awe. How can a man be so entirely corrupt as to rise in rebellion against this Supreme Being?
You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat… The individual citizen, in violating one of the laws of his country, is a criminal deserving punishment. He has acted for his own selfish advantage. But it is quite a different thing if an officeholder evades the duly promulgated laws of the nation for the benefit of the “State.” In the opinion of “reactionary” courts he may be technically guilty of a contravention. But in a higher moral sense he was right. He has broken human laws lest he violate a divine law. Kafka would recognize this issue.
In the nineteenth century the parliaments were intent on restricting public expenditures as much as possible. But now thrift became despicable. Boundless spending was considered a wise policy. Both the party in power and the opposition strove for popularity by openhandedness. To create new offices with new employees was called a “positive” policy, and every attempt to prevent squandering public funds was disparaged as “negativism.” Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for. Mises must be rolling in his grave now!
Nineteenth-century liberalism tried to limit the right of the Ministry of Education to interfere with the freedom of university professors to teach what they considered true and correct. But as the government appointed the professors, it appointed only trustworthy and reliable men, that is, men who shared the government’s viewpoint and were ready to disparage economics and to teach the doctrine of government omnipotence… To maintain the theory that there are such things as economic laws was deemed a kind of rebellion. For if there are economic laws, then governments cannot be regarded as omnipotent, as their policies could only succeed when adjusted to the operation of these laws. Thus the main concern of the German professors of the social sciences was to denounce the scandalous heresy that there is a regularity in economic phenomena.
1944! European totalitarianism is an upshot of bureaucracy’s preëminence in the field of education. The universities paved the way for the dictators… Every dictator plans to rear, raise, feed, and train his fellow men as the breeder does his cattle. His aim is not to make the people happy but to bring them into a condition which renders him, the dictator, happy. He wants to domesticate them, to give them cattle status. The cattle breeder also is a benevolent despot.
Is there hope? Every half-wit can use a whip and force other people to obey. But it requires brains and diligence to serve the public. Only a few people succeed in producing shoes better and cheaper than their competitors. The inefficient expert will always aim at bureaucratic supremacy. He is fully aware of the fact that he cannot succeed within a competitive system. For him all-round bureaucratization is a refuge… The man who is aware of his inability to stand competition scorns “this mad competitive system.” He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. Not too much.
Interesting foreshadowing: Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft [planned economy]. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin. Porque no los dos?
T.I.L. Marx never attempted to explain in unambiguous language what the characteristic mark of an economic class is. When he died, thirty-five years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, he left the manuscript of the third volume of his main treatise, Capital, unfinished. And, very significantly, the manuscript breaks off just at the point at which the explanation of this fundamental notion of his entire philosophy was to be given. Neither Marx nor any one of the host of Marxian writers could tell us what a social class is, much less whether such social classes really play in the social structure the role assigned to them in the doctrine.
Cui bono? The capitalist variety of competition is to outdo other people on the market through offering better and cheaper goods. The bureaucratic variety consists in intrigues at the “courts” of those in power. There was a good deal of flattery, adulation, servility, and cringing at the courts of all despotic rulers.
Beware the Intelligensia: The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The intellectuals were never keen enough to see the manifest contradictions of their creeds. It did not in the least impair the popularity of Fascism that Mussolini in the same speech praised the Italians as the representatives of the oldest Western civilization and as the youngest among the civilized nations. No German nationalist minded it when dark-haired Hitler, corpulent Goering, and lame Goebbels were praised as the shining representatives of the tall, slim, fair-haired, heroic Aryan master race. Is it not amazing that many millions of non-Russians are firmly convinced that the Soviet regime is democratic, even more democratic than America?… They always tacitly assume that the dictator will do exactly what they themselves want him to do. Like many Trump voters.
When citizens are under the intellectual hegemony of the bureaucratic professionals, society breaks up into two castes: the ruling professionals, the Brahmins, and the gullible citizenry. Then despotism emerges, whatever the wording of constitutions and laws may be. Democracy means self-determination. How can people determine their own affairs if they are too indifferent to gain through their own thinking an independent judgment on fundamental political and economic problems? Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.
It is imperative to unmask the inferiority of bureaucratic methods when compared with those of private business. The aim of such a scrutiny is certainly not to disparage the work of tax collectors, customs officers, and patrolmen or to belittle their achievements. But it is necessary to show in what essential respects a steel plant differs from an embassy and a shoe plant from a marriage license bureau, and why it would be mischievous to reorganize a bakery according to the pattern of the post office. I got you!
And we leave with this zinger! The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in its intellectual history; for the rest, I think it’s a bit long and perhaps off-topic for them, although it seems rather timely to me! FOUR STARS.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Pictures from the Water Trade

I found this book in our local “give a book, take a book” shelf just before we left on vacation for Tokyo. What an excellent coincidence!

John David Morley’s 1985 novel is a semi-autobiographical story of his time in Japan (mostly in Tokyo), as witnessed in its subtitle — The extraordinarily evocative, at times erotic, story of an Englishman’s discovery of Japan (shortened to Adventures of a Westerner in Japan for squeamish American audiences).

“Water trade” refers to the late-night, dark and obscure culture of small bars, where strangers showed their other sides to each other and hostesses. That world — and thus the fit of the title — is not only for bars, but in other places where Japanese people escape from the obligations and confinements of uchi, or family and community.

The book is full of interesting anthropological observations, many of which persist to today. I found myself constantly referring to 50-year old anecdotes as we passed through various conversations, events and places on our vacation here.

The most gripping — and emotionally wrought — story appears in the middle of the book, as Boon (the main character modeled on Morley) and Mariko struggle between passion and uchi in a modern version of forbidden love.

There are other scenes of “at times erotic” that I will leave to you. All of them contrast “Western” habits and mores with those of Japan; none of them show one side to be superior.

Another main theme (besides stumbling among dozens of bars and their various denizens) draws from Boon’s friendships with Japanese, which are possible by his learning of the language as well as their curiosity about outsiders. (I remember how Americans were afraid of “Godzilla Japan” in the 1980s, just as they now fear China.)

These friendships range from hilarious (his roommate decides to marry to escape Boon’s terrible cooking; the roommate, of course, doesn’t cook at all) to challenging (veering between power games and paranoid alliances) to baffling (“we all scooped some of grandpa’s ashes into the urn and went to eat a terrible meal”). You feel as if you are there — sometimes drowning, sometimes swimming — with Boon.

Uchi is (partially) explained by the lack of privacy in Japanese houses with thin walls and shared rooms, which has led the locals to adapt: merging self with group, indirectly (and deniably) asking and answering questions, adopting dual personas within the same day with the same people (rigid in the office; shitfaced drunk right after). The Japanese seem to be good at compartmentalisation.*

Some notes:

Golfing is expensive, so normal people buy the best gear… for hitting on an indoor driving range.
The Japanese appreciate Nature for its beauty but also its constant attempts to kill them with fire, floods and earthquakes.
In spoken and written (calligraphic) language, there is meaning in what is not said and the white spaces where nothing is written. With calligraphy in particular, one must commit. There is no undo so a pause is appropriate.
Japanese houses are (were) designed for summer’s sticky heat, which means they can be freezing in winter. (They are now full of climate controls, which have many drawbacks.)
“In Japan the public-private axis is really the insider [uchi]-outsider axis.”
“Expressions of gratitude often come in the form of apology.”
“The water trade was a valve. This was where the strain of Japanese society was borne, more or less everything found a reflection or an echo here. For a student of Japanese affairs like Boon study of the water trade was a duty as rewarding as it was congenial. Knowledge acquired in more conventional ways was also necessary, but without the attuned, receptive ear schooled in the forum of the water trade a library of books would have been of limited use to an understanding of the Japanese. The transition from spoken to written Japanese not merely brought a loss in immediacy; it also evinced a change in character. Distaste for the written memorandum, the preference whenever possible for the physical presence of one’s interlocutor, made evident a reliance on the spoken word for which it would be difficult to find parallels in any modern society as sophisticated and complex as Japan’s.“
Wives and mistresses each played their own role, aware of the other. (I think this sentiment has probably changed. Not unrelated, the birth rate per Japanese woman dropped from 3.65 in 1950 to 1.8 in 1980 to 1.25 in 2020.

I really enjoyed this book. FIVE STARS.

*The book doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing clutter vs Zen calm, but this article does a nice job demolishing the idea that the Japanese live in a spartan environment. Marie Kondo was popular in Japan because they have a clutter problem. Only the very poor and very rich live with empty rooms.

Here are all my reviews.

Review: Death and the Penguin

This 1996 novel by Andrei Kurkov tells the story of a failign writer who suddenly finds himself with a full time job writing obituaries. He also has a penguin, Misha, who he “rescues” from Kyiv’s zoo when they run out of money to feed their animals.

The book’s most interesting “contribution” is its description of the weirdnesses of 1990s Ukraine. It was hard for anyone to count on anything, as the Soviet world turned upside down.

You’d have to read it, but here are some characteristic passages:

“Am I ill?” he wondered, staring at the blank paper protruding from the typewriter. “No, I must, must, sometimes at least, make myself write short stories, or else I’ll go mad.” He fell to thinking of Sonya’s funny little freckled face, her red ponytail with its elastic band. Odd times to be a child in. An odd country, an odd life which he had no desire to make sense of. To endure, full stop, that was all he wanted.
For lunch Viktor gave Misha fish, while he and Sonya had fried potatoes. “I’ll buy a bit more food tomorrow,” he promised. “This’ll do me,” she said, taking the larger plate
“So no need to worry. Look at me [Viktor’s editor], serene as a tank, even though they’ve just murdered my driver! Believe me, life’s not something to be concerned about.”
Those who merited obituaries had usually achieved things, fought for their ideals, and when locked in battle, it wasn’t easy to remain entirely honest and upright. Today’s battles were all for material gain, anyway. The crazy idealist was extinct – survived by the crazy pragmatist …
Viktor made coffee, rejoicing in the peace of the flat… A peace which enabled him to sit down with a cup of coffee and calmly think it all over. A peace which made it possible to sit without thinking even, just drinking coffee, dwelling on its flavour, keeping at arm’s length thoughts capable of disturbing equanimity.
And there was another, the Principal Friend perhaps, that someone whose bold, sweeping signature approved Viktor’s obelisks [obituaries]. Though whether it was the text he approved or the subject, was now not at all clear. And then there were the dates, obviously determining the day of publication, but clearly predetermined during the subject’s lifetime! Death as planned economy!
Something was wrong with this life, he thought, walking with downcast eyes. Or life itself had changed, and was as it used to be – simple, comprehensible – only on the outside. Inside, it was as if the mechanism was broken, and now there was no knowing what to expect of a familiar object – be it a loaf of Ukrainian bread or a street pay telephone. Beneath every surface, inside every tree, every person, lurked an invisible alien something. The seeming reality of everything was only a relic of childhood.

FOUR STARS.

Here are all my reviews.