Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

F.E. Smith

BBC has an interesting article on predictions made by F.E. Smith, a British aristocrat. These were predictions made in 1930 for the year 2030. BBC calls them “strange”. A couple really are strange, but several of them either have come true or still could by 2030. If technological progress is truly exponential, then 2015 is too soon to rule out any outcome for 2030 – remember the old saw about the lily pond and day 29.

  • average lifespan of 150, and a cure for cancer – there have been huge gains in lifespan, but obviously nowhere near this; but it could still happen; I’m reading The End of Illness by David Agus right now. One of his points is that the discovery of highly effective treatments for infectious diseases (antibiotics, etc.) has led to a focus on disease as an invader to be fought, rather than a focus on the patient’s body as a complete system, which is what is needed for better cancer treatment. He is not optimistic about a cure, but thinks that with better prevention and early detection most people could live healthy lives to 100 or more. I am also reminded of Long For this World, a book about Aubrey de Grey, who has proposed a radical (and seemingly drastic, not to mention painful) cure for cancer that he believes could allow people to live for hundreds or even a thousand years.
  • a 16-24 hour average work week – certainly this is not the average work week for people who work today. But is it so weird? This guy probably knew John Maynard Keynes, who was making exactly these sorts of projections based on long-term increases in productivity (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren). These productivity increases, and related increases on overall monetary wealth, actually have come to pass. But two things have happened. First, the wealth is distributed unevenly, so that some people don’t have to work at all, while others have to work a lot. Of the richer countries, a few in Northern Europe have taken steps in the direction of sharing both wealth and work hours, while the Anglo-American countries and emerging Asia generally have not. Second, as we have become wealthier, we have come to see some things as necessities that would have been seen as luxuries in the past. Air conditioning comes to mind. Robert and Edward Skidelski talk a lot about these issues in How Much is Enough.
  • a color TV in every home 🙂 which would lead to a return to direct democracy 🙁
  • synthetic meat – has already happened in the lab, almost certainly will be commercialized by 2030 I would think
  • new “physiologically pleasant substances…as pleasant and harmless…” 🙂 “…as tobacco” 🙁

Books I mention above (which I am not selling):

Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs highlights three international conferences in 2015 that may be important:

In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030. And in December 2015, leaders will assemble in Paris to adopt a global agreement to head off the growing dangers of human-induced climate change.

The fundamental goal of these summits is to put the world on a course toward sustainable development, or inclusive and sustainable growth. This means growth that raises average living standards; benefits society across the income distribution, rather than just the rich; and protects, rather than wrecks, the natural environment.

Growth that protects the natural environment – I think it’s theoretically possible, but we’re a long way from that and it’s easy to be pessimistic. But at least some leaders recognize that there is a problem worth discussing. His vision is essentially one of technological progress allowing decarbonization of the energy supply:

Back in 2009 and 2010, the world’s governments agreed to keep the rise in global temperature to below 2° Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era. Yet warming is currently on course to reach 4-6 degrees by the end of the century – high enough to devastate global food production and dramatically increase the frequency of extreme weather events.

To stay below the two-degree limit, the world’s governments must embrace a core concept: “deep decarbonization” of the world’s energy system. That means a decisive shift from carbon-emitting energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, toward wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, as well as the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies when fossil fuels continue to be used. Dirty high-carbon energy must give way to clean low- and zero-carbon energy, and all energy must be used much more efficiently.

Clean energy would be an enormous breakthrough. But would it end all our problems, allowing us to grow indefinitely from that point without consequences? In their book Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. explain why that might not necessarily be the case:

in a complex, finite world, if you remove or raise one limit and go on growing, you encounter another limit. Especially if the growth is exponential, the next limit will show up surprisingly soon. There are layers of limits.

What might the next limit be? maybe depletion of the phosphorus supply, loss of fertile soil, collapse of the oceans, a catastrophic plague affecting crops or people, etc. The point is just not to think that solving the carbon emissions problem would end all the problems caused by our enormous footprint on the natural world.

Looney Tunes

What the…

For once, I’m speechless…

The real Agenda 21 is not a secret conspiracy. At least, it’s not secret – it’s right here. I think the main reason people make up stuff about it rather than actually reading it, is that it’s mind-numbingly boring. I certainly haven’t read it all the way through. I don’t think anyone could. From a quick skim, it’s about sustainable development, but it’s hardly radical. In fact, it’s generally pro-trade and pro-growth.

slavery

What happens when an economic system is designed to support the profit-seeking of a small class of immoral people? Well, that sort of thing might have happened somewhere in the world in the past, but certainly not in the United States. Oh wait…

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph…

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits…

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

These are quotes from a New York Times review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

automation

Longreads has an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. “Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,” he wrote. “And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.” It was at this point that what Hughes termed “technological momentum” took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. “The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.” Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.” As an example, he points to freight shipping. Not long ago, coordinating a shipment of cargo across national borders required legions of clipboard-wielding functionaries. Now, it’s handled by computers. Commerce of all sorts is increasingly managed through, as Arthur puts it, “a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines.” To be in business is to have networked computers capable of taking part in that conversation. Any sizable company has little choice but to automate and then automate some more. It has to redesign its work flows and its products to allow for ever-greater computer monitoring and control, and it has to restrict the involvement of people in its supply and production processes. People, after all, can’t keep up with computer chatter; they just slow down the conversation.

“Living Planet Report”

WWF has released a new edition of their “Living Planet Report”. I like this report, for one thing, because it has kept the idea of ecological footprint alive. Ecological footprint was originally developed, or at least widely publicized, in this book in the 90s:

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Ecological footprint may be the most intuitive way of explaining the idea that humanity is overdrawing the Earth’s resources. The new report puts the ecological footprint at 1.5, meaning 1.5 Earth’s would be required to support our current level of natural resource consumption and waste production indefinitely. To understand how this is possible, imagine you are lucky enough that your parents put a massive trust fund in your name the day you are born. Being born on the Earth is like this. If you are smart, you can live your entire life on the interest, and so can your children and children’s children, as long as they are as smart as you. If you are dumb, you can live an extravagant lifestyle for some period of time, maybe a long time, but eventually it will catch up to you. An ecological footprint of 1.5 suggests that humanity is using up about 1.5 times the amount of natural capital each year that the Earth can support in the long term. Natural capital is the obvious things like fossil fuels and fish, but also less tangible things like fertile soils and the ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products.

The accuracy of Wackernagel’s methods can be endlessly debated, and have been, but the WWF report also has a reader-friendly summary of more recent academic work on “planetary boundaries”. These look at carbon emissions, loads of nitrogen pollution, crop land as a percent of ice-free land, and humanity’s appropriation of primary productivity, among other things. And generally, I think they converge on a pretty similar conclusion that we are living beyond our means and eventually we are going to pay. Normally I try not to shamelessly promote my book, but for my book I made what I think is a pretty cool and useful graphic, which I am sharing below.

planetary_boundaries

Summary of Ecological Footprint and Planetary Boundary Literature

And just in case you think I might be making this stuff up, here are my references:

Rockstrom, J. et al., 2009. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society 14, 32.

Running, S.W., 2012. A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere. Science 337, 1458–1459. doi:10.1126/science.1227620

Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees, 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth, New catalyst bioregional series. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC ; Philadelphia, PA.

 

the shifts and the shocks

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’’ve Learned —and Have Still to Learn— from the Financial Crisis

Felix Salmon in the New York Times has this to say:

Martin Wolf is as grand and important as an economic journalist can ever become… His is the loudest and foremost voice saying that the global policy response to the crisis was far too timid; that it all but ensures we will have an even worse crisis down the road; and that unless we start implementing extreme measures today, we will be running headlong into catastrophe.

According to Salmon, his (Wolf’s) solution to the problem is the following:

  1. “central banks should target a much higher rate of inflation”
  2. “abolishing ­fractional-reserve banking, which would give governments the job of directly creating all the money in the economy”
  3. “attempts to prevent corporations from accumulating cash”
  4. “an end to the tax-deductibility of interest payments”
  5. “a scaling back of international banks”
  6. “a mass refinancing of European sovereign debt into eurobonds”
  7. “a radical change in debt contracts to make them much more equitylike”

Okay. I don’t know. I don’t really have the expertise to agree or disagree. All this seems aimed at giving the government and/or central bankers more direct control over the money supply. But do the experts really know exactly what the money supply should be? If we give the keys to the printing press over to the politicians, I think we know what will happen. If we give them to a handful of “experts”, I’m not sure we know what will happen, except that the world economy will be at the mercy of whatever theories they happen to believe in. That leaves the ebb and flow of individual banks setting interest rates based on supply, demand, and greed, with the government trying to nudge the system back toward balance if it starts to get out of balance.

It doesn’t seem like a great system, but if we experiment with something different and it causes the masses to lose our faith that money is a real thing (because it is only because we think it is), that would be hard to recover from. So I don’t know, maybe higher capital requirements but short of 100%, complete transparency in trading of derivatives and other weird forms of risk trading, and a constitutional amendment (in the U.S. anyway) to ban campaign contributions or political speech of any kind by financial corporations. The individual human persons who work for those corporations could still engage in political speech, of course, but only as private citizens using their own time and money.

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

There’s a free excerpt of this 2006 book posted here. Basically, Benjamin Friedman argues that there is a moral argument to strive for as much economic growth as possible. Not only does it increase material wellbeing, it improves health, adds years to people’s lives, and allows people to have more leisure time. He also believes that it tends to support development of peace, tolerance, and stable, democratic institutions over time.

The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political and, ultimately, the moral character of a people.

Economic growth—meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens—more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity,
social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western thinking has regarded each of these tendencies positively, and in explicitly moral terms.

This is a different definition than just increasing GDP, which makes no implicit moral judgment about equity or fairness. If we define economic growth as growing a more equal (or at least, truly equal opportunity), just, sustainable society, then no rational person will have any objection to it. But I don’t think that is the most common definition in daily use today.

my favorite non-fiction books

Somebody asked me recently for a list of my favorite non-fiction books. It was tough to come up with a short list, but I came up with one based on two criteria – they had to have a significant effect on my mental model of the world, and more importantly they had to be a thoroughly enjoyable read. So, understanding that not everyone has the same taste in books and would love the books I love, here are some of my all-time favorites in no particular order:

How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor Library of Science)