John
She is a good writer and did a good job exposing the key moments and decisions that set us on this disastrous path where, as she quotes Rohit Chopra as saying, “Students aren’t the customers, they are the products.” But the book falls a little short in several ways — first, she seems to feel obliged to add the obligatory “Wave a magic wand” chapter in which she imagines a complete overhaul of higher education from top to bottom on a national scale . . . Not that many pages after briefly discussing the Supreme Court’s final transformation into a National Policy Council, wherein it gets to decide which decisions are major and which are not, thereby allowing its Federalist Society members to determine — absent any constitutional basis whatsoever — which administration policies may be enacted through executive action and which must come through Congress as “major questions.” So, in a country where even the plain language of the law allows the administration to forgive student loan debts (just as the IRS routinely forgives tax debts) but the Supreme Court insists otherwise, a chapter on magical reforms is just wasted.
Better she should have spent her time comparing our debacle in education funding to our debacle in health care funding, housing policy, conservation, immigration, and mental health systems — all areas of enormous public failure because of the retreat from the idea of these areas as essentially public questions into simply battles over private entitlement. She talks about the transformation of education after the GI Bill from a public good to a private investment, and the book would have benefitted greatly from putting that hideous transformation into context by showing how the same impoverished thinking that has led higher education into its weakened and enervated state has been operating across every other public policy aspect as well.
Being vastly shorter and written with a more engaging style, this book has a far lower opportunity cost than “Slouching Towards Utopia” and tells much the same story. Leigh is a far better writer, and he makes good use of a few choice graphics. But, in the end, his “How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity” is just another glib and superficial paean to capitalism that actually explains nothing.
The one trick repeated again and again in lieu of any actual “explanation” is to note some great advance in human wellbeing and ascribe that advance somehow to “economics” — in other words, all the work from the Enlightenment and all the study and effort that physicists and chemists and agronomists have put in to propel great advances in health and welfare is counted as having somehow depended on economics and economists. Thus, in writing about economics, Leigh is like virtually all other economists, acting like the “researchers” at the Institute for Creation Research (the outfit that masquerades as scientifically minded folks who just happen to think that evolution is a myth) — they already know the gospel, their sole task is to busy themselves trying to tell more and more vignettes of the received wisdom in an ever more compelling way. If economists had any explanatory power, societies with more economists would out-compete societies with more physicists and chemists and engineers. Better to read Harari’s “Sapiens” than this.
This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
This is the book that anyone who deals with scam victims needs to read to understand how the global tsunami of internet scamming works — griftocurrency is not just a harmless table top game played by libertarian, it’s an entire ecosystem built to facilitate exploitation of vulnerable people by predators, who are responding exactly as you would expect: by scamming people out of their savings and by enslaving vulnerable people in poor countries and forcing them to prey on people in rich countries, like small boys forced to work as pick-pockets in Victorian England.
The whole point of griftocurrency is to create a parasite money system that lets people who enjoy and depend on the all the global systems offered by the legit market and tax systems (clean water, food systems, etc) profit from scams tax free, while consuming more energy than many nations to do worthless computing games (“mining” griftocurrencies).
This is probably the best of all the innocence books out there — by a former ace prosecutor, this covers the whole waterfront of factors that lead to the recurring and all-too-frequent misconviction and the innocent and failure to find and convict the guilty that results. Every judge and prosecutor in America should be required to study and receive annual refresher training on the factors Godsey identifies, and disinterested prosecutors and judges should be required to assess every case against these wrongful conviction factors to identify red flags leading to errors. Post conviction relief is not enough when the system merrily chugs along convicting the innocent and winning praise and glory for the prosecutors and judges who lock in on their theory of the case and blind themselves to the reality before them.
Tremendously important book here in 2024 — tracing the roots of nearly every MAGA fetish and paranoid fantasy of the “brown peril,” as Stephen Miller plots concentration camps should Trump succeed in regaining the White House. I got it from the library but I will be on the lookout for a copy because it has so much interesting history that it would make a great reference, if it doesn’t get tossed on the pile of burning books in 2025 under Trump II.
Very good. Author bends over backwards to be fair to Tesla and Musk but, in the end, the essential — as in, the very essence of — similarity of Trump to Musk is impossible to ignore. The main difference seems to be that Musk is every bit the grifter and PT Barnum that Trump is, but has the wit to realize that he needs to surround himself with smart people (though he seems, like Trump, to most drive away people with any independent talent). Musk is thus the “thinking man’s Trump” — but he is still very much a Trumpian figure, rather than a Ford or even a Bezos.
I would give this more stars if I could. Nearly a perfect book — a gripping story followed by a thoughtful context analyzing the forces at work and a preview of coming ‘attractions’ set to bedevil us if we do not awaken from our trance of thinking that somehow this will all work out. Very hard to put down, and impossible to forget. I am pretty sure this will be among my top five books of the 21st C for a long long time to come.
I had to listen to this on audiobook as I was sure it would be too easy to quit in print form. A hugely hugely important book — the kind of book you wish every pundit and politician would read and that every pastor and imam and rabbi and talk radio host had read. Here in Spring 2024, as Israel wages total war on the civilians trapped in Gaza, it’s an absolutely chilling read. I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust but I learned a good deal in each chapter, and especially I learned a new perspective that puts the rise of the Alt-Right in the US and Europe into sharp relief and gives me chills. Easily one of the top books of the 21st C so far.
A book about what happens when a society recovering after a war and a pandemic is taken over by explicit and unashamed white supremacist thugs who worship a con man who thinks no rules apply to him and that he can do whatever he wants. This is a great book and I wish every American could read it and be warned … Egan knows how to write a page-turner.
Left you wanting a follow up book like “They Thought They Were Free” — an exploration of how the people of Indiana wrestled with having been part of a mass psychosis after the fever broke. We see now that, as Indiana was thought to be the Alabama of the North in the 1920s, it’s the Alabama of the north again today - deeply deeply in thrall to MAGA instead of its ancestor, the KKK.
This is such a worthy book on a crucial subject; painful in many places. The author's main background as an education reporter brought him into the story and, to his credit, he realized the larger forces at work and operating nationally as the elites keep fleeing "the last great thing" for the "next great thing" -- except that trying to do that now (now that the overall economy has stopped expansion in real wealth and overall wealth has become ever more grotesquely unequal) means that it's a game of exploding musical chairs, where they keep building a few nice recliner chairs with massage features every round, but most of the chairs have rotted so badly that when someone sits down they end up losing wealth instead of repeating the historic post-war run, where the racial spoils system meant that all the white GIs returning got to get into the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme on the ground floor, while people of color are like people who have to try to run to catch a bus that left the stop ...
He interviewed Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns while writing the book, and Chuck had him on the Strong Towns podcast in early 2024 -- it was a prickly interview because Chuck kept wanting to say "It's not about race, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme victimizes poor people on a race neutral basis" . . . which is only half-right -- because the way we segregated the suburbs through legal means (see "The Color of Law" if you are unfamiliar with the way the racial segregation was anything but happenstance) meant that family wealth has never happened for most families of color, and now that the music keeps stopping more and more as the economy increasingly becomes nothing but casino speculation, it's overwhelmingly the case that the most frequent victims of the exploding chairs in the musical chairs game are the people of color who, had they been allowed to build wealth on an equal basis with whites after WWII, would be vastly ahead of where they are now.
Except for things funded by gas taxes, we've stopped lavishing wealth on the suburbs -- just as the folks who benefited the most from that practice now flee for the exurbs and privatized schools and services.
This is actually a 4.5 star review with two 1-star deductions for howling errors that seem to stem mainly the author’s self-regard for his own mathematical savvy and the kind of “I’m clever in this area, so I must be clever in this area too” bias that trips up so many.
Overall, it’s a good update of the themes from some better but older books in the genre such as “Innumeracy” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” and Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong.” Chapter 7, “Alternate Realities” about the misuse of statistics in the criminal justice system is especially worthwhile and important, and the three short appendices explaining various examples of mathematical errors are quite good.
The deductions are for an early comment accusing Al Gore of cherry-picking data in his famous slide-deck presentations by showing what the Florida coastline would look like if the Greenland ice sheet melted, causing see levels to rise 20 feet. Seife notes that Gore is right to warn about sea level rise — but he wrote “It’s just that sea levels aren’t going to rise twenty feet anytime soon.” Here in 2024 — but also in 2010 — there was lots of evidence that our models of the effects of climate instability are persistently and systematically UNDERestimating both the pace and severity of changes. It reads as if Seife was dying to find an example of cherry picking that he could hang on a Democrat, so he simply asserted something that, alas, seems less certain every day, that we needn’t concern ourselves “anytime soon” with what a world without Greenland ice would look like.
The second star is deducted because Seife does only the most superficial gloss on the math of voting methods and ends up saying that it’s all just sport and that we like third party spoilers because it makes elections more interesting. Instead of noting that the entire gerrymandering problem he spends significant time covering is the result of the arcane single-member district system that is not constitutionally required, Seife simply asserts that we can simply use non-partisan redistricting commissions to abolish gerrymandering … which ignores the consequence of self-sorting, which is giving white rural voters a significant over representation in the US House to go with their significant overweight in power through the US Senate. Seife attacks ranked-choice voting and asserts — in direct contradiction to substantial evidence — that voter errors would “go through the roof” if ranked choice ballots are adopted.
ISBN 978-0-670-02216-8, 2010 Viking Press
This is the BEST book on education ever — I’ve read it a couple times now and it just makes me so sad that I didn’t have a teacher like Paul Lockhart, and it makes me crazy that despite his book, the US has doubled and tripled down on drone model “math education” that, as he says, is exquisitely well designed to crush any interest in or desire to engage with anything mathematical. If we in the USA taught reproduction as well as we teach math, we’d have a collapsing population that would make Japan’s birth dearth seem like a population explosion.
An amazing life story, and a real window into how life was much less brutal, at least for white men, in the post-war period before 1980. Instead of saddling the talented Mr. Hook with huge debts as we do with students today, the government paid (twice) to send him to art schools so that he could pursue his calling as an artist, and he ended up getting some significant grants for his artwork, which allowed him to pursue his triple avocations of chess, gambling and art. He built an amazing life that, if you proposed it for a script today, would be thrown out as completely implausible. He’s was not the greatest writer but he does convey a fantastic story and you end up greatly regretting not having been able to spend time with him and hear some of his stories.
Very worthwhile — profiles people who have figured out that you don’t change minds by trying to force people to let go of their beliefs in favor of yours, but rather by using normal professional sales techniques (believe in what you’re selling, sell the benefits, don’t adopt your competitors’ frames, etc.) and listening to people to find out what THEIR concerns are, rather than just insisting that they should be concerned with what you are concerned with. Quite a hopeful book all in all. I was impressed, liked it much more than I thought I would. Would recommend most highly.
Heartfelt book, occasionally lyrical, occasionally tedious and hectoring. It doesn’t fully deliver on its promise or spend nearly enough space on trying to understand exactly how the spiders in private equity funds spin webs around cities and towns to keep the game of musical chairs going (always making sure there is less housing than people so as to keep people desperate for a place they can be safe in). He doesn’t wrestle at all with city/county budgeting or where the money is supposed to come from to create these community land trusts that he places so much reliance on for a better future. He alludes briefly to neighbor NIMBYs who profess that “housing is a human right” while doing everything possible to ensure that no one builds any near them, especially if it’s for poor people.
Perhaps the best part of the book is his clear-eyed realization that a system built around private profit will always configure itself to optimize the net profit from the system — not the amount of housing. This is an insight that far too many who write about housing miss — they rail about “market failures” in the housing arena, not realizing that an unstable market that whipsaws people (booms and busts) is not a failure at all for those with capital who like to buy low and sell high, and for whom boom-bust cycles are necessary. Talking about market failures while a few are becoming rich off of the housing market means you don’t understand — a market that is generating profits is no failure, it’s working just as designed. So of course change is hard, because the few who benefit enormously from this system have every incentive to spend big buying politicians who only attack housing shortages (intentional and unintentional) with ineffective solutions that are only capable of perpetuating the problem on an ever-larger scale (while they make comforting but useless noises about “caring” and “fighting for” affordable housing).
Actually should be a five star review for the quality of writing and for the chills it delivers, and the quality of analysis. The last chapter cost it a star — basically, it’s “Well, those minorities who enjoy all this excess power that is structurally theirs because of big defects in our system might agree to give that up one day.” It was like reading a gripping book about climate change and then having a chapter at the end that says “Don’t despair, fossil fuel interests and the wealthy folks who cause the most emissions will come around one day for sure!”
Very surprising to me that Mother Jones writer Schulman could write such a boring book, at least the first third of it. This is another book that is made fat with needless pages because of the refusal to use pictures and diagrams. Family Trees would’ve been amazingly helpful For keeping the people sorted out, and Trees illustrating the corporate mergers among all the Banking entities would have spared us readers many, many paragraphs and confusion about who we were reading about. Imagine trying to solve a crossword puzzle where you only have the clues in words and you don’t have a graphic showing where the blanks are and where the dead squares are. That’s what much of this book is like. There’s some fascinating material in there but it’s really hard to access and keep organized in your mind.
When they do the post-Mortem on printed books and why people stopped reading them in printed form, this book will be discussed. I usually prefer printed books, but this is one where I kept wanting to have access to Wikipedia and other resources to try to fill the gaps in the presentation of this material. The biggest problem is that the book is really about one particular banker, Schiff, and that’s when the book starts to pick up and get a lot more interesting. It ends very strongly In the chapters about the gross antisemitism of the Gilded Age, and the rise of Hitler in Germany. If the author had simply focused the book on the story of Schiff from the start, much of the rest could’ve been told in digressions, and then backstory in a much more comprehensible and interesting way.
Some tremendous sections in here. A chilling read in November 2023, 85 years after Kristallnacht, when a small group of Nazis marched down State St in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. The back third of the book trying to suss out the “German” character doesn’t hold up well at all, but the first 15 chapters are full of insights and recognizable people who fill the MAGA movement here.