Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

new book on soil

Here’s a review on a new book on soil.

Soils had not excited many ecologists until, two decades ago, soil ecologists started emphasizing that many aboveground phenomena are under belowground control. Richard Bardgett is one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable of the soil scientists who have contributed to the current enthusiasm about soils. In his recent book Earth Matters: How Soil Underlies Civilization he explains how much human societies depend on soil. He writes about how soils are formed, how they influence biodiversity and food quality, and what role they play in cities and in war, and introduces us to the interplay of soils and climate change.

bicycles, airships, and things that go

I have read Cars, Trucks, and Things that Go to my 3 year old son at least 100 times. It is his favorite book in the world. I didn’t have a lot to do with this – I actually tried to steer him more toward animals and nature, but his fascination with wheels began shortly after birth and shows no signs of abating. It’s clearly baked in to his genetic makeup, which is interesting considering that almost all evolution of our genetic makeups happened before cars, trucks or other things that go (other than legs and muscles) ever existed. Perhaps humans, and the male of the species in general, just have an instinctive attraction to power, whether it comes from harnessing animals or burning things and then transferring that power through mechanical or electrical means. That would clearly give us an advantage and it makes total sense, but it is amazing that it emerges within months of birth.

I’m not going to censor Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. But there is a lot of pollution and unsafe road conditions in those books, plus head-scratching things like children driving cars, and enormous pileups where nobody gets hurt. So I think it’s great that some people are trying to update that classic winning formula with updated and more sustainable technology choices. Of course, kids don’t need to be brainwashed in the latest urban planning buzzwords, they need to be educated in how to think about systems so they can reach the right conclusions and make the right choices when they grow up. They also need to be entertained. We’ll see if this succeeds.

Scandinavian equality

Recently I wrote a post about how it seems ludicrous to blame the United States’s problems on an excess of democracy, if democracy is defined as equality. I also suggested that a reasonable definition of democracy should include a consensus building process, which is not just rule by majority vote, but a method to choose policies that almost everyone can accept even if they are not everyone’s first choice.

Well, the Scandinavian democracies at first glance seem to achieve equality, consensus, wealth, and peace. I want to believe in that, and to believe that we could learn its secrets and bring them to the United States. Here is a dissenting view though, in a new book about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway:

After the Second World War, Scandinavia seemed to create model societies, free of corruption and intolerance, moral, compassionate and fair. The Danish people had bravely defied their Nazi occupiers throughout the war and saved almost all of the nation’s Jews. In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published a groundbreaking critique of the racism faced by African-­Americans in the United States. Myrdal’s study, “An American Dilemma,” greatly influenced President Truman’s executive order to integrate the United States military, the Supreme Court’s ruling on behalf of school desegregation, and the creation of the modern civil rights movement. In 1964, Gunnar Jahn, a former leader of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, handed Martin Luther King Jr. the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. Jahn expressed the hope that “conflicts between races, nations and political systems can be solved, not by fire and sword, but in a spirit of true brotherly love.”

Today, the third-largest political party in Sweden has the support of racists and neo-Nazis. The leading political party in Denmark is not only anti-immigrant but also anti-Muslim. And the finance minister of Norway, a member of the right-wing Progress Party, once suggested that all the Romany people in her country should be deported by bus. In “One of Us,” the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad explores a dark side of contemporary Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring Breivik, a mass murderer who killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, as a protest against women’s rights, cultural diversity and the growing influence of Islam.

I don’t necessarily buy this. There are problems in every country, and I think the countries of northern Europe (I would throw Germany and the Netherlands into the mix) have quite possibly done the most anywhere to try to solve them and create the best human societies they can. I don’t think they claim to be utopian, only to be striving for utopian ideals. Most impressively to me, they try to build consensus not by keeping outsiders at bay and trying to remain homogeneous, but by allowing diversity and then trying to deal with it, which is the harder path. Because they have chosen the harder but potentially more rewarding path, there is a visible right-wing backlash developing. I think something similar has happened in the United States – the intolerant minority has become more vocal and visible as we have become more tolerant and pluralistic overall. This doesn’t mean there aren’t vulnerabilities – if the intolerant element becomes large and active enough to gain real power, bad outcomes are obviously possible. Economic stagnation, violence and fear can all increase the risk of bad outcomes.

Jane Jacobs

This article about Jane Jacobs is most useful because it mentions all of her major works. It talks quite a bit about Dark Age Ahead. I read Dark Age Ahead, and yet it doesn’t stick in my mind. I am ashamed to admit that I have only read the first chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and yet that first chapter sticks in my mind. I am lucky enough to live in one of the great American cities, and in fact a neighborhood that she visited and commented on. I had to spend a few years away from it to really come to understand how great a walkable street grid with a mix of homes, businesses, workplaces and green spaces really is, and how rare it unfortunately is. One day I’ll sit down on a bench in one of those green spaces and finish Death and Life.

Blowback Economics

I’m nearing the end of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Towards the end he makes some novel economic arguments that I will have to think about. Basically, he argues that the rhetoric of free trade and globalization that arose after World War II was at first political in nature, acting as an ideological counterweight to communism. It supported a geopolitical strategy which was to get industry off to a fast start in Japan and later Korea, open the U.S. market to their exports and allow their economies to grow quickly, creating strong Cold War allies in Asia. The U.S. itself was highly industrialized, growing fast, and its markets were by far the largest in the world, so at first it could absorb these exports and drive growth abroad just fine. But over time, Japan and Korea grew large relative to the U.S., and other economies like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong began to copy the model, and later the nations of Southeast Asia and of course China. Johnson argues that the U.S. kept its own markets open without insisting that these countries do the same. The result was the slowing of growth in the U.S., loss of the industrial base, loss of well paying blue collar jobs, and inner-city and small-town poverty. Meanwhile, he argues that because labor costs stayed low in Asia, which by now western multinational corporations were insisting on, the middle class in Asia was not growing fast enough to be able to afford the things they were making. With the U.S. stagnating at the same time, the U.S. couldn’t afford to buy all the things being made either. All this led to manufacturing over-capacity in Asia and under-demand globally, which he sees as leading directly to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. So in his view, the free market, free trade ideology we somewhat take as a given now began as a cynical propaganda campaign, which outlived its usefulness with the end of the Cold War. He blames the financial industry for pushing the system over the edge, but does not see financial speculation or risk taking as a root cause. Publishing in 2000, he suggests that 1997 may end up being seen by history as the high water mark of the American empire, after which it went into decline.

Like I said, I have to think about all this. For one thing, while the U.S. might have directly subsidized the rise of Cold War allies like Japan, Korea and Taiwan to some extent, you certainly can’t make that same case for China, which followed almost exactly the same trajectory a bit later. And the economic theory behind free trade is pretty elegant and appealing. You can’t base a national economy on subsidized, inefficient domestic industries forever and expect to remain competitive. You need to adapt to change rather than resist change. On the other hand, you need strategies to slow the rate of change so you have time to adapt, retrain as many workers as possible, educate the next generation of workers, build public infrastructure that allows the private sector to operate efficiently, and provide a safety net for those who are still left behind. The U.S. clearly failed to do these things, at least in the city centers and small factory towns that used to depend on heavy industry. To some extent I think Chalmers is right that we believed our own Cold War propaganda and let ideology prevent us from taking the measures that would have allowed us to adapt better.

Donald Trump and Blowback

I still won’t dignify Trump’s (or any politician’s) appeals to bigotry or science denial for a second, but I found myself pausing to consider some of the foreign policy ideas he mentioned in his recent New York Times article. No, not his support for nuclear proliferation in Japan or South Korea, of course. That is insanity. If the world has to have nuclear weapons (which I don’t accept, other than in the very short term), it makes much more sense for a very small number of responsible (?) parties to keep them under lock and key and agree to protect others. In fact, one of the diabolical things about nuclear weapons is that relative to their destructive and strategic power they are incredibly cheap compared to conventional weapons and boots on the ground. It is the enormous number of boots on the ground in places like Japan and South Korea that it may be time to reconsider, and mainstream politicians are generally not willing to stand up to the military-industrial establishment and bring that up for discussion.

I have recently been reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. A key point he makes is that the United States propped up dictators and conservative governments around the world during the Cold War, often subverting popular democratic movements, and this led to a lot of resentment. Japan and South Korea are two of his examples. He says that the United States controls a huge area of the island of Okinawa, entirely rent free (and contrary to Trump’s claim that other countries don’t pay anything, another example of his not bothering to check his facts assuming that his supporters won’t bother either), and that this leads to a lot of resentment among the Japanese population to this day. In Korea, he claims that the CIA actively subverted democratic movements in favor of military dictators that proved to reliable Cold War allies. An even more surprising claim I had never heard before was that the South Korean military regime was actively pursuing nuclear weapons early on, and that the North Korean nuclear program was initially a response to this. Later South Korea agreed to give up its program, while North Korea obviously has not. Anyway, the focus of Johnson’s book is actually the 1990s, the period between the end of the Cold War and the book’s publication in 2000, when the U.S. had a chance to dial back its military footprint around the world, tone down the resentment, and chose not to.

So the U.S. probably could pull back its boots-on-the-ground military commitments in Japan and South Korea, stay engaged with these countries through trade and diplomatic channels (another area I was surprised to find myself nodding my head slightly while reading Trump’s interview). These countries are rich and powerful enough to take care of themselves to a large extent. The U.S. Navy, Air Force, and nuclear umbrella could still get there pretty quick to support them if needed.

If we did that, what are the odds of a country like Japan taking a militaristic expansionist turn again? That doesn’t seem too likely in Japan’s case. But the rest of the world could monitor and stay engaged through trade, diplomacy, and organizations like the United Nations Security Council. At the end of the Cold War, the Security Council seemed to be the body that was going to defend national borders. Rather than complicated, entangled groups of allies that could become ensnared in world wars, the simple story was that if one powerful country took aggressive action against a neighbor, all the other powerful countries in the world would suddenly become an alliance against it. Aggressive war would be futile. This would justify each country having a capable military, but no country has to devote an enormous chunk of its economic and social energy to weapons and the capability to commit violence as the United States has over the past 70 years or so. It’s a simple and naive story I’m sure, but not as naive as a purely pacifist approach, and an ideal to work towards.

“why we lost” Iraq and Afghanistan

Daniel Bolger is a retired U.S. general who has written a book about why he thinks the U.S. lost these two wars.

Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: With American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.

Since there aren’t enough soldiers — having “outsourced defense to the willing,” the American people stay on the sidelines — the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, “in the vain hope that something might somehow improve.”

Toward what end? Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. “Defining the enemy defined the war,” he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is “everyone.”

Well, if you can’t figure out who you are fighting or why, it is not likely that you will ever be able to say you accomplished your objective. These were really wars fought for no obvious reason, and blowback may only be starting. Hopefully lessons were learned.

Runaway Inequality

Les Leopold is a guy who wrote a book called Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice. Here’s an excerpt from an interview about the book:

In the late ’70s, roughly, a new economic philosophy really caught hold in both political parties. It originally came from the right, from Milton Friedman and the free marketeers. Academics call it neoliberalism; in the book, we call it the “Better Business Climate.”

It basically was kind of a simple model. Cut taxes, cut regulations, cut back social spending so people will be more eager to find work and be less dependent on the government, and basically undermine the power of labor unions so the economy would run more on market principles and have less inefficiencies in it. There would be more investment and profits, and therefore, all boats would rise. It would lead to kind of a boom economy. That was the theory. I was in graduate school when that was going on, and it was pretty strong, even more liberal economists were sort of giving up on Keynesianism and going in this direction.

What they didn’t teach us and what they never discussed is that it’s one thing to deregulate trucking or airlines or telecommunications, but it’s quite another thing to deregulate the financial sector… In 1980, about two percent of a company’s profits were used for stock buybacks. By 2007, 75 percent of all corporate profits were used to buy back their own shares. Forget about R&D, forget about workers’ wages, forget about all that kind of stuff. All that matters to a CEO today is raising the prices of the shares through stock buybacks.

The mantra makes some logical sense – capitalism is about competition to create better products at better prices and operate efficiently in the short term, and a necessity to innovate if you want to compete in the long term. Consumers are supposed to win. Profit and stock price are supposed to be the score card that determines which companies are winning, and the possibility of winning is the incentive to play the game. This all makes some sense, unless and until people are gaming the system to such an extent it is not really competition any more.

‘Beyond: Our Future in Space,’ by Chris Impey

This is a new book about the potential for space colonization.

Its concluding section presents a scattered but sweeping vision for our future in space, and offers more plausible ideas than can be found in whole shelves of futuristic science fiction. Want to construct a lunar base, or mine asteroids for precious resources? Are you looking for alien life in our solar system, or habitable planets around other stars? Impey covers all this and much, much more in a brilliantly brisk series of chapters intended to show how we might someday become not only an interplanetary species but also an interstellar one.

Such a leap would be far more epochal than that of the Apollo moon landings, Impey notes. If Earth were the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the marble-size moon would be only a yard away — and the nearest neighboring star system would be 30,000 miles distant. Though that distance may now seem insurmountable, Impey implores us to consider the possibility of crossing it, even if only to grasp how far we have come since our ancestors spread out of Africa, and how far we still must go in securing a legacy for our distant descendants.

Someday, the sun and Earth will perish, but humanity may have the choice to be “more than a footnote in the history of the Milky Way.” Contemplating this future “and the possibility that we might not exist at all, is as haunting as deep space,” Impey writes.

The book review makes some references to H.G. Wells’ 1902 essay series Anticipations, which I might get around to reading some day.

Nation on the Take

In Nation on the Take, Wendell Potter and Nick Peniman talk about the extent to which the U.S. political system has been hijacked to serve the interests of big business.

On campaign finance:

It is the knowledge that an elected official has of who is writing the check, who’s going to be there if and when this person decides to run for reelection, that they can expect another campaign check if they have demonstrated that they are voting the way the donor wants…One of the things I used to do in my job in the insurance industry was administer the political action committee and there’s a lot of thought that goes into who you write checks to, and you want to make sure that you’re writing checks to people who can be persuaded to see things from your perspective and vote for the things that you want them to or vote against things you are not supporting when the time comes.

On the finance industry:

Their contributions have been extensive and continue to be so and certainly the legislation that was finally approved by Congress, the Dodd-Frank Act, and other pieces of legislation that have been proposed to regulate the financial industry were written to a large extent by the lobbyists for financial institutions. And we point out in the book how the interest of the banks and mortgage companies were served first, and the challenges and the difficulties that a lot of average homeowners are having even yet today to keep their homes out of foreclosure… I remember watching Bill Moyers’ show a number of years ago when he had Gretchen Morgenson on, the chief financial reporter for The New York Times, and when she was asked whether or not Dodd-Frank had tackled the big stuff, she said, “No, absolutely not. It hasn’t and we could likely have another financial crisis as a result.” And when asked why, she said, “Because the banks have hundreds of lobbyists in Washington and the American people have none.”

On the pharmaceutical industry:

Despite the promises that Barack Obama had made when he was running for president that at the very least Medicare should have the ability to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries — and he also campaigned on making it lawful for Americans to reimport medications from Canada where drugs are a lot cheaper — despite those campaign promises, President Obama gave both of those up under intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to be able to get something passed…Yes, few people realize that even though the pharmaceutical industry talks a great deal about how much they spend on research and development, the companies spend far more on sales and marketing than research. In fact, most of the research is done at taxpayers’ expense by governmental or quasigovernmental entities like the National Institutes of Health and universities that get funding from the government. So much of the research is done at the taxpayers’ expense, and rightfully so. But the companies themselves spend relatively little on research. They take the research typically and invest in the development of medications but most of the prescription medications are developed at publicly funded institutions. And in a sense we pay twice as a consequence. We pay for the research as taxpayers and of course we pay dearly whenever we need the medication.

On the food industry:

We want our kids to eat healthy, period. That should just be a no-brainer, a fait accompli in a good society. But instead, because of the power of money in politics, it becomes hyperpoliticized, a massive battle with all kinds of very powerful people who make a lot of money trying to manipulate the food items that show up on our kids’ plates at their school cafeteria.