Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

Unnatural Selection

Amazon description:

Gonorrhea. Bed bugs. Weeds. Salamanders. People. All are evolving, some surprisingly rapidly, in response to our chemical age. In Unnatural Selection, Emily Monosson shows how our drugs, pesticides, and pollution are exerting intense selection pressure on all manner of species. And we humans might not like the result.

Monosson reveals that the very code of life is more fluid than once imagined. When our powerful chemicals put the pressure on to evolve or die, beneficial traits can sweep rapidly through a population. Species with explosive population growth—the bugs, bacteria, and weeds—tend to thrive, while bigger, slower-to-reproduce creatures, like ourselves, are more likely to succumb.

Monosson explores contemporary evolution in all its guises. She examines the species that we are actively trying to beat back, from agricultural pests to life-threatening bacteria, and those that are collateral damage—creatures struggling to adapt to a polluted world. Monosson also presents cutting-edge science on gene expression, showing how environmental stressors are leaving their mark on plants, animals, and possibly humans for generations to come.

risk and investing

This blog is about looking at possible futures, not necessarily profiting from them. But of course, who doesn’t want to do that if they can? It’s not just about short-term profit, it’s about building a nest egg which is your personal resilience against whatever events the future holds. A nest egg is also about your personal choice to defer some happiness now for the possibility of greater happiness later.

This book looks promising to me. The author breaks risks into “inflation, deflation, confiscation, and devastation”. I haven’t read the book, but presumably he offers portfolio suggestions to deal with these risks.

Since I’m on personal finance today, here is a grab bag of other related topics and links.

One thing everyone can and should do right away is minimize how much the financial industry steals from us in the form of fees. Index funds are one way to do this. The case to go all-index is incredibly strong, but in case you don’t want to take my word for it, Vanguard makes the case every year. If you are the type to dig into numbers yourself, S&P has a free online data set here. Finally, this Economist column mentions a number of smaller startup companies that are providing some competition to the big banks and their ridiculous fees. Among them is TransferWise which says it allows people to transfer money abroad much cheaper than they have been able to in the past. I haven’t tried it yet.

Secular Stagnation

The “secular stagnation hypothesis” has now been around long enough that it has a nickname – SecStag. The basic idea is that the world may have entered a period of low economic growth that is going to persist for a long time, and governments need to start responding to it. This long ebook has chapters from a number of famous economists, including Larry Summers, Barry Eichengreen, Robert Gordon, Paul Krugman, and Edward Glaeser.

It’s hard for the non-economist to summarize, but I’ll try. Some of the ideas are:

  • The real interest rate is essentially the price of borrowing money. When people want to save (loan it out) more than other people want to borrow (invest it in new capital, infrastructure, inventions, business activity), it suggests that the rate of innovation, or profitable new investment possibilities, might have slowed down.
  • One way the rate of new profitable investments would slow down is if the rate of technological progress has slowed down compared to what it was over the past 50 years or so. Some are suggesting that.
  • Another possibility is that the type of technological progress that is occurring is harder to turn into profits than in the past, meaning it is not showing up in the traditional tracking numbers.
  • Another way is if governments are investing too little in infrastructure, and companies are investing too little in research and development because they are uncertain whether it will pay off.
  • Another way is if people are saving more for a rainy day, because there are more people nearing retirement as a fraction of the population than there used to be, and/or people and firms are saving because they are uncertain about the future, for example because they fear losing their jobs or having to may large health care bills.
  • Another possibility is that innovation is occurring, but only benefiting a few rich people and corporations at the top of the income scale, so that the average person is not benefiting.
  • A final possibility is that workers’ skills became obsolete because they were idle for too long after the recession hit. The idea that education is inadequate is also similar to this.

I think the explanation for the recent low GDP growth could be some combination of all of these, although I have a lot of trouble buying the lack of innovation hypothesis. Corporate profits and stock markets seem to be up, suggesting to me that profitable innovation is occurring but benefiting only a chosen few.

The automation vs. employment debate isn’t mentioned very much here, and climate change is mentioned only once in the 179 page book.

kids and risk

I like the way Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, talks about risk:

I think that we are thinking like lawyers a lot now because our society is so litigious, especially in America. For instance, one kid fell off a swing, maybe 20 years ago, broke her arm, sued the park district, and suddenly park districts across America started taking out high swings, they started taking out teeter-totters – see-saws – they started taking out merry-go-rounds. And so they started thinking like lawyers and then we started internalising the idea that, like, “Oh my God! It must be very dangerous for our children to do these things if they’re being removed from regular life.” And everything started seeming so dangerous that we sort of forgot, like, yes, some things are a little dangerous – you go on a merry-go-round, there’s a chance you’ll fall off, there’s a chance you might, your kid might break an arm. There’s also a chance they’ll have a fantastic time, they’ll lose weight, they’ll be fit, they’ll have something fun to do after school instead of just turning on the TV or going to the computer. But we always think in terms of the what if? worst case scenario, and that’s thinking like a lawyer. Because a lawyer could go to court and say, “We knew that these merry-go-rounds are dangerous! And why did they have one there? I’m asking you!” And we think ahead to that point and get rid of anything fun, even if the risk is tiny, because we think a tiny risk even is not worth it.

…in the same day that I’m saying children should go to the park, 769 children will be diagnosed with diabetes,” – that’s in the United States. That’s twice as many as 10 years ago. Nobody says, “How dare you let your child stay inside! What if they get diabetes?” Nobody says that. “How dare you let your kids stay at home just watching TV – they’re gonna get depressed, they’re gonna get fat, they’re not gonna have any friends, they’re not gonna have memories of their childhood.” Nobody thinks about the trade-off. Everything is straight to: you let your child have one iota of freedom, what if something terrible happens. They see the iota[?], they see the rape, murder and dismemberment and they try to put them together and of course it doesn’t work. What I’m suggesting is let your kids have the kind of well-thought-out freedom with you training them. Train them to cross the street, train them, “Don’t go off with strangers”, train them to swim. You know, I do think our job is to keep our children safe, but I don’t think that the outside is so unsafe that we have to regard it as Predators’ Ball every time you open the door.

I agree with most of this, except that the outside really is unsafe, not because of predatory humans but because of motor vehicles – you really can’t “train them to cross the street” safely because the streets are not designed safely. In reasonably developed countries that are not at war, I am positive that cars are the biggest source of violence against children. Of course at the present time we need to train our children to cross our unsafe streets as safely as possible. We also have to accept the risk that they can cross the street exactly the way we train them and still never come home. If we don’t want to accept this risk, then we can’t continue to accept unsafe street designs. Politicians and planners and engineers who perpetuate unsafe street designs, and all the rest of us who complacently accept them, are the real murderers and dismemberers of children. The solutions are known. This is a risk to children we really can do something about. Let’s do it!

What Should We Be Worried About?

Need new stuff to worry about? They have a book for that!

What Should We Be Worried About: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night
by John Brockman

Steven Pinker uncovers the real risk factors for war * Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi peers into the coming virtual abyss * Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek laments our squandered opportunities to prevent global catastrophe * Seth Lloyd calculates the threat of a financial black hole * Alison Gopnik on the loss of childhood * Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why firefighters understand risk far better than economic “experts” * Matt Ridley on the alarming re-emergence of superstition * Daniel C. Dennett and george dyson ponder the impact of a major breakdown of the Internet * Jennifer Jacquet fears human-induced damage to the planet due to “the Anthropocebo Effect” * Douglas Rushkoff fears humanity is losing its soul * Nicholas Carr on the “patience deficit” * Tim O’Reilly foresees a coming new Dark Age * Scott Atran on the homogenization of human experience * Sherry Turkle explores what’s lost when kids are constantly connected * Kevin Kelly outlines the looming “underpopulation bomb” * Helen Fisher on the fate of men * Lawrence Krauss dreads what we don’t know about the universe * Susan Blackmore on the loss of manual skills * Kate Jeffery on the death of death * plus J. Craig Venter, Daniel Goleman, Virginia Heffernan, Sam Harris, Brian Eno, Martin Rees, and more

“Right of Boom” and “7 Deadly Scenarios”

The New York Times recently had a review of this book:

Here is the Amazon description:

A nuclear weapon explodes in a major American city and no one can prove who is responsible. The devastation is horrifying, but even more alarming is the limited options available for the United States government to respond. What happens next?
In Right of Boom, national security specialist Benjamin Schwartz looks at what could happen after a nuclear explosion takes place in the United States, the event that Presidents Obama and Bush, as well as would-be Presidents Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, have acknowledged as the greatest single national security threat we face. Hypothesizing an explosion in downtown Washington, D.C., Schwartz maps out the likely ramifications while going deep into history to explore the limited range of options available to a Commander in Chief. Drawing from his experience as an analyst at the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, Schwartz offers a fully panoramic view of a terrifying reality.

However, the review said not to read that one and to read this one instead:

A global pandemic finds millions swarming across the U.S. border. Major American cities are leveled by black-market nukes. China’s growing civil unrest ignites a global showdown. Pakistan’s collapse leads to a hunt for its nuclear weapons. What if the worst that could happen actually happens? How will we respond? Are we prepared?

These are the questions that Andrew F. Krepinevich asks—and answers—in this timely and often chilling book. As a military expert and consultant, Krepinevich must think the unthinkable based on the latest intelligence and geopolitical trends—and devise a response in the event our worst nightmares become reality.

As riveting as a thriller, 7 Deadly Scenarios reveals the forces—both overt and covert—that are in play; the real ambitions of world powers, terrorist groups, and rogue states; and the actions and counteractions both our enemies and our allies can be expected to take—and what we must do to prepare before it’s too late.

I think it’s important to think about not just the military implications, but the implications for the global economy and overall confidence of the public. Considering that the 9/11/2001 attacks killed 3,000 people, caused a sharp recession, and led the United States to launch two wars and spend at least a trillion dollars, the effects of a much worse attack or a series of them are very concerning.

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.

H.T. Odum

I promised some posts about H.T. Odum this year, so here goes.

First, because I’m cheap, I bought a used copy of his 1983 book Systems Ecology: An Introduction, that a library was getting rid of. This book was reissued in 1994 as Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology. My 1983 copy has some typos and endearingly quaint references like this:

The amount of memory within the computer useful for storing programs is usually between 8000 and 64,000 bytes.

He probably updated that in the 1994 version, but whatever it was updated to probably still sounds endearingly quaint today. It reminds us how far we have come.

The 1983 book has a chapter on “analog computers”. Digital computers have come so far and are so powerful that I guess we have forgotten that this sort of thing used to be useful. An analog computer is basically a circuit, and you can simulate almost any kind of system with a circuit – in a hydraulic system, water flow is analogous to electric flow and friction is analogous to electric resistance, for example. Essentially, he took the idea that energy flows through any kind of system and drew beautiful circuit diagrams of how those systems work. Almost any kind of system between the sub-atomic scale and the astronomical scale – mechanical systems, cells, organisms, ecosystems, cities, farms, economies, etc. Although the systems can get pretty complex, in both structure and behavior, they are all based on a set of surprisingly simple core building blocks, and the same set of core building blocks can describe any of these seemingly very different systems.

All the systems are concerned in some way with controlling the flow of energy and using it to do useful work. This concept is fairly obvious in electrical and mechanical systems, but it is also present in my body right now, where electrons are being passed through a series of complex chemical bonds that allow my body to operate its various organs, maintain my temperature, and repair tissues as they break down and build new tissues (hopefully not too much more, at this point.) A rainforest, a coral reef, a city, and the global economy are similarly engaged in controlling the flow of energy and using it to perform useful work. One of his key concepts was that systems try to maximize “power”, or find the right flow rate of energy that can be converted into the most useful work. Extracting the most work always involves controlling or limiting the flow in some way, which always results in some dissipation as heat. (I should mention, he doesn’t use the word “work” in exactly the same sense that I am, but I find it useful to think of work as the amount of energy that was converted into something useful.)

Another core concept was “embodied energy”, which I think of as the sum of all the useful work it took to get to a certain point in a system. For example, a fish has more embodied energy than the plants it ate, and an eagle more than the fish it ate, and a city more than the farms and mines that produced the raw materials to sustain its people and its economy.

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

This post is a must read. I did not expect anything in it. It’s hard to pick a quote because the whole thing is quotable. Anyway:

There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting bacteria that you basically grow on natural gas. And then we can either eat that directly or process it or say, feed it to rats and then eat the rats. Then there’s the bacteria that we can grow directly on wood. Or on leftover mushroom waste. And so this would be taking down a tree, pulverizing it, turning it into a slurry, and then letting the bacteria go at it.

So for instance, there are bacteria that secrete sugars they then use to feed themselves. You can pull out the sugars, and eat those ourselves and leave the bacteria and the partially decaying wood pulp. And we can feed that stuff to other things. So for instance, rats digest wood to some degree, particularly after it is partially broken down that way. This makes a fairly good solution. We could feed something similar to chickens. And chicken is something maybe people would maybe be happier to eat than bacteria milkshakes.

So – we’re going to cut down all the trees, which is going to be hard because they will be frozen. Then we pulp them, feed the pulp to bacteria, then to rats, then eat the rats. Please people, let’s not let it get to this point.

It also reminded me of the yeast vats in The Caves of Steel. Also how certain yeast strains can make wheat beer taste like bananas, even though there are no bananas in there. It has occurred to me before that fungi could be a key to feeding people in a world that was photosynthetically limited for one reason or another.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.