Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

Katrina, 15 years on

August 29, 2020 will be the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans. I think it’s a critical event to understand for at least two reasons. First, it was an early, regional example of U.S. governmental failure to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. Now we have a crisis unfolding on a much larger scale, and the government is proving to be just as inept as it was in 2005, with far greater consequences. So I think Katrina was an early warning of government dysfunction that we failed to heed.

As far as coronavirus goes, we are past the prepare stage and it is getting late to mount an effective response. We can still recover though. New Orleans didn’t really recover fully, according to this article.

A year after the storm, over half the city’s schools remained shut; under a third of flooded-out residents had returned; and few buses were running in a city where more than a third of African American households did not own cars. By the second anniversary, no further schools had reopened and damaged rental units largely languished unrepaired. And in 2015, the number of children living in poverty, almost 40 per cent – nearly twice the national average – remained unchanged from when the levees broke.

TLS

So Katrina was a cautionary tale of the U.S. government (and I’m talking federal, state, and local) failing to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. On a more literal level, it will not be the last coastal American city to be inundated. Eventually they may all be inundated. It is time to learn from what went wrong in Katrina and figure out how to apply it nationally to prepare, respond, and recover from the disasters that are coming.

Doughnut Economics

Doughnut Economics is a new attempt to communicate the goal of an economy that works for humans while not exceeding the natural limits of the planetary system it is embedded in. You want to be in the dough part. If you are in the hole, you are within planetary boundaries but you are poor, starving, unwell, or otherwise not benefiting from the economy that is working for at least some other people. If you are outside the doughnut entirely, you are outside planetary boundaries and the planetary system will not be able to continue supporting the economic system (including you, and everyone else) indefinitely.

The majority of intelligent and educated people on the planet do not understand these concepts. We need a critical mass of people, certainly leaders and decision makers, to understand the problem before we have much hope of solving it. I support new and novel attempts to communicate these ideas. This one doesn’t quite seem fully coherent to me in terms of stocks and flows, and I think if we taught children about stocks and flows from a young age they would grow up better able to understand systems in terms that aren’t so dumbed down.

More from Less by Andrew McAfee

More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next is a new(ish) entry in the decoupling/dematerialization debate. The argument is that we (i.e. the United States) are gradually using fewer natural resources and producing less pollution each year while still growing our economy and quality of life.

This is the point in the post where I have to admit I am reviewing a book I haven’t read. I read the description of the book on Amazon, and this review in Foreign Policy. I would imagine that an MIT scientist (the author, Andrew McAfee) would get the math right. I would imagine he probably understands the difference between stocks and flows. But the general public, and even well- but narrowly educated people typically do not. First we have to decrease the rate at which our footprint is growing, which it sounds like this book might make a case that we have. That is good. But our footprint is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely, and still growing. Second, we have to start shrinking our footprint. I don’t think we have, and I am not sure this book makes that case. It is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely. Third, we have to shrink it to a level that can sustain our way of life indefinitely. We have to complete these three steps in order, and complete them all before it is too late to save our civilization and our planet’s ecosystems in roughly their current state. It’s unfair because I am literally judging the book by its cover, but it sounds like it makes a case that we might have completed only the first step.

The Foreign Policy article argues that it doesn’t even make that compelling case because it ignores trade and external impacts. In other words, the environmental impact of our domestic consumption and economic activities is happening in developing countries, plus the oceans and atmosphere. It’s surprising to me if he made that obvious a mistake, but again, I would have to read the book to find out. It is unlikely my employer and family and need for some minimal amount of physical rest will afford me an opportunity to do that soon. So if you read it, let me know what you find out!

Philadelphia

As the protests, clashes between police and citizens, looting and arson continue in Philadelphia, I find myself thinking back to On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. A lot of the book is about the relationship between the police and citizens in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and specifically (although place names are thinly disguised in the book) one of the neighborhoods where the tear gas and rubber bullets were flying yesterday.

The story the book tells is one where young men grow up without much prospect of finding a job in the formal economy, and get involved in the informal drug economy as a way to earn an income. In the informal drug economy, there is no recourse to the authorities when someone is robbed or otherwise taken advantage of. There are robberies, assaults, and cycles of escalating revenge that wind up with the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods in jail, probation or parole. Once young men are in jail, they tend to come out harder than they went in, and they are even less likely to break out of the cycle.

To break this cycle, we should follow the evidence of what has been tried and worked, of course. But just using logic and system thinking, the most obvious and quick way to break this cycle would be to legalize drugs. Then there would be no driver for the violence. Legalize, tax, and use the proceeds to fuel substance abuse and mental health programs that have been proven to work. Or just set up a universal health care system that provides these things to all citizens.

Then there is the harder long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own. Childcare, education, health care, unemployment, disability, retirement. The process of building a stable, fair, and democratic society for the long haul would be a hard and long-term project, but other countries have figured out most of it and the United States could learn.

Health Department guys

“What guys, Officer?” Vic asked.

“Health Department guys,” Joe Bob said.

Vic said, “Oh Jesus, it was cholera. I knowed it was…”

“Then they got on the phone to the Plague Center in Atlanta, and those guys are going to be here this afternoon. But they said in the meantime that the State Health Department was to send some fellas out here and see all the guys that were in the station last night, and the guys that drove the rescue unit to Braintree. I dunno, but it sounds to me like they want you quarantined.”

“Moses in the bullrushes,” Hap said, frightened.

“The Atlanta Plague Center’s federal,” Vic said. “Would they send out a planeload of federal men just for cholera?”

The Stand

Because if the Feds from Atlanta show up in their white suits, you know it is serious. They will do whatever it takes to save the country, even if it means incinerating you and everyone you have been in contact with.

Okay, things don’t turn out so well for the country or most characters in The Stand, but it was not for lack of a rapid and heavy handed government response.

what E.O. Wilson is up to

What, you haven’t received this month’s issue of The Bitter Southerner yet? An interview with E.O. Wilson finds him 90 years old and only semi-retired, living in Massachussetts.

In 2016, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he claims that if every nation sets aside half its landmass and waters for nature, then we can ensure the continuing existence of 85% of all species on the planet — including ourselves. The book garnered acclaim and criticism, but, like much of Wilson’s work, its central tenets have become more mainstream over time. 

the best scholarly books of the decade

This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

Delta-v

I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.

best urban planning books of 2019

Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.

more on fully automated luxury communism

Here is the Amazon review of the actual book:

In the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.

Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.

Amazon