Book Reviews: The Age of Turbulence and The Age of the Unthinkable

This is a review of two books by two authors each trying, grandly, to define an "Age." One is an 80 year old who has decades of experience in economics, business, and at the highest levels of government. The other is by younger man without the benefit of so much experience and so many lived-through crisis who is nevertheless attempting a revolutionary manifesto. One book demonstrates wisdom and nuance, and has an underlying current of thought that says that we can never be too sure of things. The other lays out a far-reaching and comprehensive global world-view that leaves no real room for doubt or second guessing.

Of course, it's probably not a surprise that the older man is not the one demonstrating wisdom, but rather the straightjacket of ideological precepts he faithfully served for 40 years. But it is still striking how it seems as though Alan Greenspan has written a book of anti-wisdom. His book is a faithful catalog of ideas that ruled the world for decades and now, still, lies shattered.

Greenspan's book, the Age of Turbulence, came out before the Great Recession. Even his prologue to the paperback edition came out before the worst hit. And so, his book is confident and breezy. This is a nice touch as he describes his life. I can confirm what all the reviews I read said: the first, biographical, half of the book is quite enjoyable. But the second half, his take on the world and his prescriptions for it, is like watching an particularly painful episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sure enough, right there on page 230, Greenspan mentions exotic mortgages. His take is that, "the typical American household ended up with a more valuable home and better access to the wealth it represented." Sure we took on more debt and there might be a bubble but hey, we'll all recover nicely. He does have one concern about the boom years though: all that income inequality. But never fear, better education will take care of that.

OK, at some level, this isn't really fair to Greenspan. He's been brutally honest about the failings of his ideology and the concerns he expresses are real and legitimate. From everything I can tell he's a decent guy who tried to serve his country well, and for 18 years at the Fed had no indication that he was doing less than a superb job. But sometimes, the messenger gets shot when the message is bad enough. The Age of "Turbulence" ended with a massive gust of wind shear that damn near took the whole country down. His book reads as if Mikhail Gorbachev had written a testament to the majesty of Communism in 1989.

Joshua Cooper Ramo, who, as a partner in Kissinger & Associates, ought to be kinder to 80-something ex-government types takes it to Alan Greenspan quite often in his book, The Age of the Unthinkable. And rightly so. Ramo, like Malcolm Gladwell, illustrates ideas with vignettes. He tells about the success of Hezbollah (which is quite remarkable considering the Israeli army and intelligence services they are up against); about drug-resistant tuberculosis; about a man who got a fundamental flaw in the internet fixed without revealing the problem (because it would have allowed the hackers to take things down before the patches could be applied). In short, he writes about all kinds of complex and unpredictable systems that take down men like Greenspan and Gorbachev. As he puts its, complex systems can, "demolish poor Alan Greenspan's hope that even 40 years of experience is a reliable guide to the future."

The best example Ramo gives in his book is an experiment done by dropping grains of sand onto a plate, one at a time. Slowly, without any human intervention, the grains of sand will form a pyramid. They form a structure that, for all the world, looks supremely well-managed and stable, even though no outside force is doing the managing or stabilizing (anyone else thinking of the Invisible Hand?). But then, suddenly and without warning, one single grain will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It will send the whole pyramid crashing down. And here's the craziest part: no one can predict which grain of sand will be the one that causes the crash. Over and over scientists have done this experiment and we still cannot predict the future. Even 40 years of experience is not a reliable guide to the future.

Ramo's solution is to fight fire with fire. If Al Qaeda is using decentralized cells, then perhaps the State Department and intelligence community should be radically decentralized. He provides a fascinating example of a Brazilian company that gave so much power to its workers during the 1990 hyperinflation that its owner no longer even knows what all the company does or how many employees it has. Another example is that the South African government's resistance to handing out AIDS drugs led to a grass roots people-power movement that has succeeded remarkably at quelling AIDS, while the government's multimillion dollar tuberculosis program resulted in people stopping medication too early leading to drug resistant forms of the disease.

According to Ramo we need to be resilient not just defensive. The sandpile is coming down sooner or later and we'd better be ready for it. By contrast, Greenspan is trying to describe what keeps the sandpile up so we can continue to build it higher and higher. I don't know about you, but after this last decade I'm afraid I have to side with Ramo. And to highly recommend his book--the first three or four chapters get you there if you're in a hurry. But we all need to start thinking about the sandpile on which we're living.

Book Review: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

First off, I borrowed this book from the library and I have to say that Nicole and I are loving our re-discovery of the library.  Free books!  And it’s perfectly legal!  (Do the publishers know about this?)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a collection of short stories that has been hailed as a masterwork that will return the short story form from exile.  I’m not so sure.  The first four stories are about men who are, well, losers.  These stories are well-written and satisfying in a thank-goodness-that’s-not-me-but-maybe-there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of way.  And they do “rescue” the short story in that they tend not to leave you wanting more.  15-20 pages of these guys and you pretty much get where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.   The stories are interesting and entertaining, but no one needs more than a vignette of these fellows. 
The first four stories are so similar that my hunch is that most reviewers stopped reading and assumed that the rest of the book followed the pattern, because Tower is hailed as a writer of men’s stories.  But Tower doesn’t just stick to these men.  The middle stories are about kids, including one narrated by, gasp, a girl.  These stories are somehow less satisfying.  For example, divorce is a constant theme in the book, but a divorced man is different from a child of divorce.  The guy is going to be lonely and regretful.  But the kid are dealing with all kinds of stuff about whether Mom and Dad still love them and how to deal with Stepmom or Stepdad.  We get a snapshot of a particular kid at a particular time but it’s not enough to fill in the arc of the kid’s life.  And so, like many an American, I’m left wanting more of the story.  I don’t need a happy ending but I need and ending.
The last couple of stories get gruesome in parts – the title story is about Vikings – and just left me feeling queasy.  All very realistic stuff I suppose, but I feel like this book was enough of that sort of thing for me.  Tower’s a very good writer but I hope he’s got more tricks up his sleeve.

The Future (of the news) is Now

We've been hearing a lot lately about the impending demise of the mainstream news media. Newspapers around the country are failing or in big trouble, including some of the premier names. Ditto for the major (American) newsmagazines and even the network TV news divisions. It is true that businesses--even whole industries-- come and go. But many people fear that the decline of news organizations could leave us without an important check on government corruption, abuse, and oppression.

Most commentators are blaming the Internet for these changes. Craigslist allows anyone to post for free the kind of classified ads they once had to pay a newspaper to print. Google News allows anyone to browse the stories from news sites around the world. And many papers themselves put their content on the web for free. Certainly the Internet has already changed the music industry and seems poised to change television and the movies. Why should newspapers be immune?

But there's one type of news source that no one seems much worried about even though it faces intense pressure from the internet: celebrity news. While the Great Recession has taken a toll on even the venerable People Magazine, this area of news seems vibrant and healthy. It seems that because celebrity news isn't considered "important news" by the traditional media, no one has spent much time wondering what it might have going for it.

First off, millions of people actually find celebrity news to be interesting enough that they're willing to shell out money for it. The fact of the matter is, a lot of people just aren't that willing to pay for news about corruption in City Hall. They may be glad that the newspaper is out there exposing it, but they'd rather not shell out to read about it. Lack of interest isn't created by Craigslist or Google News. More likely it's created by Facebook and Twitter and the bazillion other things that people have to entertain themselves with. Competition for our attention spans has never been spread over a wider spectrum o media: live performances, print, radio, television, movies, gaming platforms, Internet websites, cellphones, cellphone apps, and on and on.

But there are those who are still interested in the news and willing to put down the game controller long enough to read a magazine or newspaper. So far, however, the traditional news media hasn't been very creative in thinking about when and where to reach them. Where do most people buy their celebrity magazines? At the checkout stand. You're standing there in line and you see an intriguing cover. Jumping online to TMZ.com isn't an option in the grocery store line (at least not just yet) and so the magazine has you. The downside to this approach is that People and the like don't have a lot of steady subscribers. But the upside is that they have found a way to position themselves in a time and place that works for them.

Now think about your local newspaper. It probably gets delivered to your door every morning (or it would if you actually subscribed to it). When you wake up in the morning do you want to sit down and read the paper with your coffee like grandpa used to? Or are you checking your Blackberry and looking up what the morning commute is like right now? If you drive to work you cannot safely or efficiently read the newspaper (no, seriously, you cannot read and drive, yes I mean you). Would your boss approve if the first 30 minutes of your day was spent reading the newspaper? Finish your workday, drive home, put the kids to bed and all you want to do it watch some entertaining TV.

The newspaper is obsolete. The general interest news magazine is obsolete. This is not something that will happen in the future--this has already happened. A generation has grown to adulthood without the habit of reading the paper in the morning. No amount of handwringing will change this back. Although it's dangerous to generalize from one's personal experience, the way I interact with the news is drastically different from the way I did when I was in college. I used to subscribe to the paper Wall Street Journal. I now read it only online, along with the New York Times. But I also use Google Reader to subscribe to a number of blogs and news feeds (including a couple of blogs by the Wall Street Journal). On my walk to work each morning I listen to podcasts from NPR and the Economist, but also to recorded speeches from my former law school and elsewhere. Today I was listening to Alan Greenspan speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations about the financial crisis--a speech which I'm not even sure I saw reported anywhere. And perhaps worst of all from the perspective of my local newspaper, lately I've taken to picking up a free copy of the political newspaper Politico. While most of the country can get Politico only online, actual paper is given away free in the DC area. I take it to my desk and peruse it each morning it's printed. But it's short and focused and relevant.

I'm a news junkie and yet my local newspaper, the venerable Washington Post, is not in the mix. I don't have time to read the physical paper; the website is poorly designed and frustrating to use; the blogs I followed for a while were uninteresting; and the podcasts nonexistent as far as I know. If there are great blogs or podcasts why isn't the Post doing a better job of letting me know they're out there? I get a letter every month urging me to buy a subscription to a format I'm unlikely ever to go back to. And I like newspapers, I genuinely miss getting the physical object. I remember from my earliest days seeing my dad at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper and thinking, "this is what grownups do." I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal as a senior in high school and read every single issue (really) for 15 years. But my nostalgia isn't strong enough for me to go back to a traditional newspaper subscription and I doubt that nostalgia will be a viable business model for the newspapers.

I don't have all the answers and maybe I don't have any. But the traditional media had better recognize that you cannot save something which is already extinct. If anyone in my generation ought to be reading a newspaper, it's me. But I've moved on. My children won't even know that there was something to be nostalgic about. We so readily and condescendingly accept that factory workers displaced by globalization need "job training" and "new skills." Why should white collar reporters be immune. Buy a Flip video camera and make us a video, get a decent microphone (actually, shell out for an excellent one) and make us a podcast. Do it now. Do it like your future depends on it.

Cash for Me?

So I see in the news today a picture of a guy turning in his 1999 Ford Explorer for a new car. I remember a lot of moral outrage about bailing out irresponsible homeowners who should have known that they couldn't afford what they were buying. But bailing out irresponsible car-owners who should have known that gas might get more expensive someday is, apparently, the greatest government program since Social Security.

Can someone let me know what the next bailout is going to be for? I'd like to get in on that one since I keep missing these.

Why I've come to like Twitter more than Facebook

I keep seeing Facebook messages from all these 30-somethings I know who are all mad at Twitter for some reason (well, not just for "some reason" but because not knowing how to use Twitter makes them feel old and they've hit an age where they no longer have the time and energy to keep up for the sake of keeping up). I like Twitter a lot better, although some Facebook lovers may not like my reasons:

Twitter, is 90% of what I like about Facebook and none of what I hate. I like seeing pictures of people and Twitter kind of does that but not as well. The main thing I like about Facebook is the status updates and Twitter is basically dedicated to that. I find that people's status updates, even if mundane, kind of tell you what they're really up to or what's really going on in their life. It's not just that someone's kid had a birthday, it's "man I'm totally wiped after 15 6 year olds were over for X's birthday." That's content. The rest of Facebook is, to me, utter crap: (A) I already have an email address, thank you, and I don't need another one. (B) I couldn't care less what animal, rock star, Teletubbie, or mesozoic-era dinosaur some ridiculous quiz says you are. That tells me nothing about you. (C) I don't want to join your cause, bite your vampires, or share my personal information with some random application developer who's probably selling it (my personal information) to Russian identity-thieving mobsters just so you can remember my f'ing birthday. Buy an organizer.

Platonism and Object-Oriented Programming, or, A Post In Which I Get in Over My Head

I'm reading a book called Anathem by my favorite author Neal Stephenson. One of the things that I love about reading Stephenson is that he writes great, suspenseful, gripping fiction but he salts it heavily with discussions about some high-level topic. His books have dealt with cryptography, nanotechnology, and language. Anathem deals heavily in the philosophy of platonism. This may not seem like the stuff of a great novel, but I found it interesting enough to read up on it a bit.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/):

Platonism is the view that there exist abstract (that is, non-spatial, non-temporal) objects. Because abstract objects are wholly non-spatiotemporal, it follows that they are also entirely non-physical (they do not exist in the physical world and are not made of physical stuff) and non-mental (they are not minds or ideas in minds; the are not disembodied souls, or Gods, or anything else along these lines).

Yeah, I have no idea either, but the examples help:

Consider the sentence ‘3 is prime’. This sentence seems to say something about a particular object, namely, the number 3. Just as the sentence ‘The moon is round’ says something about the moon, so too ‘3 is prime’ seems to say something about the number 3. But what is the number 3? There are a few different views that one might endorse here, but the platonist view is that 3 is an abstract object. On this view, 3 is a real and objective thing that, like the moon, exists independently of us and our thinking (i.e., it is not just an idea in our heads). But according to platonism, 3 is different from the moon in that it is not a physical object; it is wholly non-physical, non-mental, and causally inert, and it does not exist in space or time. One might put this metaphorically by saying that on the platonist view, numbers exist “in platonic heaven”. But we should not infer from this that according to platonism, numbers exist in a place; they do not, for the concept of a place is a physical, spatial concept. It is more accurate to say that on the platonist view, numbers exist (independently of us and our thoughts) but do not exist in space and time.

Similarly, many philosophers take a platonistic view of properties. Consider, for instance, the property of being red. According to the platonist view of properties, the property of redness exists independently of any red thing. There are red balls and red houses and red shirts, and these all exist in the physical world. But platonists about properties believe that in addition to these things, redness — the property itself — also exists, and according to platonists, this property is an abstract object. Ordinary red objects are said to exemplify or instantiate redness. Plato said that they participate in redness, but this suggests a causal relationship between red objects and redness, and again, contemporary platonists would reject this.

OK, so the basic idea is that there are these ideal things that exist independent of us, but that don't exist in space or time. Physical objects may instantiate those things in one form or another. Every equilateral triangle I draw instantiates the ideal form of an equilateral triangle.

So that's the platonism part of the post. What does that have to do with object-oriented programming? By this point, any OO programmer has figured it out, based on the word "instantiate." That's a very common OOP concept. For a non-programmer, let me try a brief intro to OOP. Let's suppose you're making a computer game with a bunch of little robots. Each of these robots has different properties (arms, legs, etc.) and different actions (move forward, left turn, right turn, etc.). You could each little robot separately by hand. That's fine but it takes time and you might make mistakes and one of your little robots won't work right. Or, you could code a robot "object" (hence "object" oriented programming). This robot "object" doesn't, in itself do anything. It just contains all the basic code each of your robots is going to need. Then, when you want to put an actual robot on the screen, you "instantiate" an instance of the robot object. Need another robot? Don't reinvent the wheel, just instantiate the robot object again.

So you see that object-oriented programming isn't just a convenient way of making computers do things, it also seems to embody an entire school of philosophy. I made this connection myself, but a google search for platonism and object-oriented programming showed me that it is a well-established connection.

At this point, I should note that when Neal Stephenson is not writing, he spends a lot of time coding. He even had a part time job as a coder, not for the money, but because he wanted to do something different with his brain than write fiction. So I have no doubt that Neal understands this connection and my only question is whether his interest in platonism came from his programming or whether he sort of "discovered" the connection the way I did.

Why blog about this? Partly because I was surprised to find something so pragmatic and functional as a computer programming language might embody a philosophical system and I wanted to share it. And partly because I think it says a lot about the nature of human creativity. Philosophers dream up an idea about the world; someone decides, "hey this might work as a programming language" and someone else decides, "hey this would be interesting to explore in a novel." It makes me wonder whether there are other approaches to programming based on other philosophies. It makes me wonder whether there might be wholly different ways of organizing computer technology that would work better if only we had a better philosophy to start with. And it reminds me of why novels and fiction are important because I wouldn't have learned any of this stuff from a philosophy book.

Everything Old is New Again

The New York Times has a story about a website started by an 18 year old high school student in Vermont called Omegle (the website, not the high school student). The idea of the website is to let people chat with random strangers rather than someone they already know. As our student so wisely says, "You can’t learn anything from someone exactly like you."

Of course, for those of us who remember the Internet's early days, chatting with random strangers has a long history. In fact, I happen to know a married couple who met via a totally random MSN Messenger chat. I can remember random chats on CompuServe and AOL and ICQ and even (if I remember correctly) early versions of Skype. The whole concept of being able to chat for free with someone from anywhere in the world was one of the "gee whiz" Internet concepts right up until everyone realized that these chats don't tend to produce much in the way of learning about the world or other people. Indeed, Omegle doesn't seem to have solved the fundamental problem, summed up in the article by Jason Tanz, a senior editor at Wired:

"The first person I connected with said, 'let’s have cyber right now,'" he said of his experience on Omegle, referring to cybersex. "The second was a 14-year-old kid from London. It’s not hard to see how this is going to be a problem."

At any rate, the point is not whether Omegle is a good idea or a bad idea. The point is that to an 18 year old high school student it's a new idea. There's probably a lesson in here for would-be Internet entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to make money off of young people. The lesson is something like, think of something you used to like doing when you were a kid that people don't do anymore. Update it slightly and then have the confidence to release it into the world as though you were the first person ever to have thought of it. Otherwise you might get beat out by an 18 year old who doesn't know that he didn't invent anyway.