If you have not paid much attention to the the Samuel Bankman-Fried saga this book is a terribly misleading place to start. If you have paid a lot of If you have not paid much attention to the the Samuel Bankman-Fried saga this book is a terribly misleading place to start. If you have paid a lot of attention then this is a fascinating, page turning character portrait of Sam Bankman-Fried and the ups and inevitable down of his crazy gambling streak. While Michael Lewis persuaded me of nothing except possibly to reduce the (already lowish) trust I had in Michael Lewis, I am glad I read it.
On the good side, it filled in a lot of missing pieces on SBF's childhood, how he transitioned into finance, the role of Effective Altruism, the founding of Alameda Research, then FTX, and how it all developed.
Lewis almost completely trusts SBF's accounts of his own actions and his motives, although still presents an awful lot of damning careless recklessness. No where does Lewis engage with the large-scale lying and deception that SBF, at a bare minimum, practiced as FTX was imploding. Nor does he ask SBF to reflect on spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get young American men, and some women (don't forget Giselle) to be enticed into a pointless casino where the odds were always going to be stacked against them. Even if he did not steal his customer's money there would be an interesting story about how to reconcile what is basically a large-scale scam to benefit other causes that SBF considered more worthy.
Oddly, Lewis portrays SBF in childhood as a premature adult and in adulthood as a child who should not be expected to master the arcana of the adult world.
I was less bothered by the SBF hagiography than I was about the character assassination of the villains of the story: the bread crumbs planted throughout about Caroline Ellison, presenting her as somewhere between clueless and a possibly malevolent jilted ex lover who got to make all the decisions on her own, the CEO in bankruptcy John Ray and others.
And Lewis' attempt at forensic accounting are even more laughable than the random numbers that SBF spewed out on Twitter in the days after the collapse of FTX. As is his assertion that there was a sound business underlying all of this when it was clear that SBF was going to keep going double or nothing until he ended up with nothing.
I had intended to write a review about what I got out of this book and learned from it and why I enjoyed reading it, sorry, did not manage that (and I just write these reviews quickly and mostly for myself, so never particularly polished)....more
My daughter and I listened to about the first third of this while driving from the former West Germany to Berlin. It was riveting. The opening and theMy daughter and I listened to about the first third of this while driving from the former West Germany to Berlin. It was riveting. The opening and then the first story of a couple who was being harassed by the Stasi, the husband's mysterious death in prison, the surveillance of the funeral, and all the lies surrounding it. We listened to the rest of the book on-and-off when we got back to the United States and none of it matched that first section. I don't know if that was our situation and mindset or the fact that the book (understandably) front-loaded the best material. Don't get me wrong, the rest of the stories were all pretty amazing in their own right, including many accounts by Stasi officers, an international love story, a couple that was forced to divorce, a sick baby and an escape attempt through tunnels to save it, a rock musician, the "puzzle women" (actually many men too) putting together the shredded files, and a decent amount of historical and practical background in the process.
Overall I'm very, very positive on the book--while I knew the general outlines of the Stasi reading some of the details was revealing. And it is important to chronicle for the sake of history as many of these stories as a possible. But as a literary matter, I think too many of the stories were too disconnected--or connected only by the author's first person narrative as she met the people and learned the story. And as a historical matter I worry that some of the stories were told because they were particularly extreme (e.g., in one case someone has their freedom bought by the West but the East renegs, which the author tells us happened in only 8 of the 50,000 times this happened)....more
In the introduction to Limitless Jeanna Smialek writes, “I should offer a word of warning before you get started. Many people who write about the Fed In the introduction to Limitless Jeanna Smialek writes, “I should offer a word of warning before you get started. Many people who write about the Fed (a) suggest that its officials have saved the world, (b) suggest that they have ruined the world, or (c) suggest that they’re some sort of secret cult trying to take over the world. If that is what you’re looking for, this is not the book for you.”
She is too modest to add: “If you want a deeply reported book that combines history, economics and colorful stories about colorful personalities into a compulsively readable argument that the Fed’s power’s have greatly expanded over time, that this may have been necessary for the sake of the economy, but that it also necessitates greater transparency and scrutiny, then this is the book for you.”
If you are new to these issues you will learn a lot about the origins of the Fed, how its role evolved over time, and a spotlight especially on its response to COVID and the inflation that followed. Smialek is also focused on the way that the Fed has navigated the changing political and cultural context, including issues of race that rose to national prominence with the murder of George Floyd, climate change, and broadened notions of the employment mandate—all of which led to a situation in which “Fed officials often talk about ‘staying in their lane,’ but that lane has been expanding into an avenue.”
I’m not new to these issues but still learned a lot, both about the history, the present, some of the people that have made these changes, as well as a dilemmas and challenges of balancing a powerful and technocratic agency with desire for democratic oversight while avoiding politicization.
Of course the book is coming out while the story is still unfinished. The Fed has not brought down inflation. It has also still not had to grapple seriously with tensions in its mandate—the unemployment rate is still low while inflation is high and many still hold out hope for a soft landing that would obviate the need to choose between inflation and unemployment. We will have to see if any of this brings new limits back to way the Fed conducts itself or the mandate that Congress assigns to it.
For now, read Smialek’s excellent book—while we all anxiously await the sequel.
——————
Disclosure: I read and provided comments on much of an earlier draft of the book and after it was released I read/re-read the opening and closing chapters....more
Nick Timiraos wrote the first draft of this remarkable history as the chief economics correspondent for the Wall SFrom my Washington Postbook review:
Nick Timiraos wrote the first draft of this remarkable history as the chief economics correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and now has followed up with “Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic — and Prevented Economic Disaster.”
The book’s strength lies in its detailed original reporting and the fast-paced narrative of the harrowing month that the Fed spent nearly unilaterally preventing a financial catastrophe as the coronavirus was taking off in 2020. Embedded in the tale is a careful accounting of the economic and financial implications of the Fed’s actions. Timiraos takes the story into 2021 and the fallout from the Fed’s subsequent decisions that contributed to the highest inflation in four decades. The author conducted more than 100 interviews. (I spoke with Timiraos, who sought my perspective as an economist who had helped craft President Barack Obama’s response to the 2008 economic crisis and my view of one congressional meeting where I delivered remarks.)
The Power Law is a fascinating, compelling, detailed but never boring, thoroughly reported and meticulously presented history of the venture capital iThe Power Law is a fascinating, compelling, detailed but never boring, thoroughly reported and meticulously presented history of the venture capital industry from its inception to the present day, focusing on the people and firms, how they structured their finance and worked with founders and entrepreneurs, the successes (mostly) and a few failures, and how it has all evolved over time. It also is an effective synthesis and evaluation of the industry, both in understanding the causes and consequences of its success and evaluating real shortcomings and rebutting spurious ones.
Sebastian Mallaby is mostly positive about the industry, arguing that it is not just a set of lucky accidents or survivorship bias but instead the successes reflect a rich culture of personal networks as well as critical roles of venture capitalists in coaching, guiding and redirecting brilliant entrepreneurs and founders who can also be anything from inattentive to business concerns to reckless about disregarding them--all of which creates something much larger than the sum of its parts.
Virtually everything about the industry up through about twenty years ago was new to me. The fact that initially one might have bet on Boston with its science-related industry but a combination of accidents (the form of the venture-type companies there) and a corporate culture that was larger and more about secrets meant that did not happen and instead it emerged in Silicon Valley. How venture started with the view that founders needed to be replaced almost immediately with professional CEOs but over time the initial VC stakes got smaller and smaller, the philosophy shifted towards giving brilliant founders room to make high variance bets, and founders themselves (like Peter Thiel) started to set up their own VC firms.
The last twenty years was more familiar to me from reading the news and talking to people but even there I learned a lot about the rise of different stages of finance, how it enabled companies to stay private longer, the rise of the unicorns, and how the spectacular failures of Theranos and WeWork but even more the near implosion of Uber led to a pendulum shift back from founder control. Also the story of the failures of VCs and clean energy were interesting, as they foundered on the heavy capital requirements up front, the inability to get a big margin on their products, and changing and uncertain government policy.
The book left me wanting more on the international aspects of venture. The book's scope is largely the Silicon Valley VCs. It has a rich account of the initial phase of their movement into China and funding some of the initial Chinese super successes (much of the focus is in Alibaba), but it does not have very much on the Chinese VC industry let alone the successful Israeli one or the many failures to set up a rich network of VCs elsewhere in the world. (Some of this is in the conclusion but less in the form of narrative and history like the rest of the book and instead examples to make policy points.)
If pressed to identify a real shortcoming I would say that the book documents twenty successes for every failure and, of course, the industry's track record is almost the exact opposite. Moreover it has very few "normal" failures, the Go Network being the main one (and then Theranos and WeWork are the more spectacular one). But failures happen at lots of different stages, most of them failing to even take off into the high valuations before they crash. What are these like? Presumably the VCs in many cases played an active mentoring and coaching role and they still failed.
Mallaby defends the industry as genuinely contributing to the successes that it has generated and also against antitrust and other concerns (arguing, correctly, that those concerns should be addressed when companies misbehave not when they are initially growing and being financed). He is very critical of the lack of gender and racial/ethnic diversity in the industry (much less than in many other areas of finance) and calls out both the behavior and consequences of this.
Finally Mallaby has a number of policy recommendations both for the U.S.-China relations and for countries that want to set up a VC industry that are broadly thoughtful and sensible (although I would want to apply some critical scrutiny to his enthusiasm for tax breaks).
I listened to the audiobook with rapt attention, Patrick Radden Keefe is an extraordinary journalist and narrative nonfiction writer. The first part iI listened to the audiobook with rapt attention, Patrick Radden Keefe is an extraordinary journalist and narrative nonfiction writer. The first part is the story of Arthur Sackler, a Jewish kid from the Bronx with manic energy who holds down multiple jobs in high school, goes to medical school but uses it to become an entrepreneur in multiple overlapping spaces including drug advertising (he oversaw the Librium and Valium launches), medical periodicals and starting several companies—many of them on behalf of his younger brothers Mortimer and Raymond.
The second part of the book is about the brothers and their children, how they grew Purdue, and actively managed it as it went from a sleepy maker of commodity-like products and a laxative to the highly profitable maker of Oxycodone and then Oxycontin.
In the activities of Arthur and his brothers there is a mixture of profit seeking (or avarice) and idealism. Arthur Sackler was involved early on in trying to find scientifically-based solutions to replace the lobotomies and electroshock therapy he abhorred. Subsequently they appeared genuinely motivated by pain management and taking it broader than just terminal cancer patients on a morphine drip in the hospital. Originally the three brothers and a fourth partner had a deal that all their companies would become charitable trusts after the last of the four of them died.
It is never completely clear where they—and their children—crossed the line into the deeply unethical and arguably criminal. Certainly by a few years into the release of OxyContin it was clear that it was being heavily abused and they did not just deny it but they also actively fed it with incentive programs for salespeople that got more doctors to prescribe which rewarded the pill mills.
The third part of the book largely is about the reckoning as the empire unravels, very slowly at first and then incredibly quickly as thousands of lawsuits are filed, Purdue the company pleads guilty to felonies, the Sacklers names are taken off numerous cultural landmarks around the world, and they are completely disgraced. This third part of the book was in some ways the weakest (comparatively speaking, it was still very good), in that it read more like journalism of current events than a unique archival retelling and excavation of history. Moreover, Patrick Radden Keefe got more opinionated and judgmental in the third part which diminished its power because I sometimes worried he had a (legitimate) ax to grind, would rather he stuck to the news and let his readers make the obvious editorial judgments.
The book does not pretend to tell the full history of the opioid epidemic, its victims, and its many perpetrators. Instead it focuses on the Sackler family and their role—which he argues, likely correctly, was a large part of the story (even if it was not, you could write the story of a serial killer without needing to prove they were responsibility for the majority of murders in the country). In many ways that is a strength but the system shows through, like the way in which they captured the FDA, the senior leadership at the Justice Department, and manipulated the bankruptcy system including picking their own judge, all of which is enough to make ones blood boil.
There are places where I found Keefe less than fully balanced. He treats pharmaceutical advertising as a sort of original sin but the story is more nuanced, a lot of good has come from—for example—advertising anti-depressants in a way that has helped destigmatize mental illness. He treats greed as bad but it also is the source of innovation and the many amazing drugs we have today. I sympathize with Keefe’s concerns about the overly-strong patent system but it was not obvious to me that Purdue was worse than anyone else. And Keefe seems to share the moral judgment that Arthur Sackler’s name should be removed from his various donations despite the fact that he died before OxyContin was invented (the argument that he would have supported it if he had lived is tendentious and irrelevant).
Overall, its an excellent and important book. Not as exciting and dramatic and original as his Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland but an important and impressive exercise in accountability, one that could have been even stronger and more damning with just a little more nuance and less judgment—although many of the people in this book deserve a judgment that they have at least legally escaped from so far....more
The world is lucky that David Wessel devoted so much time, attention and open mindedness to one particular provision in the tax code, Opportunity ZoneThe world is lucky that David Wessel devoted so much time, attention and open mindedness to one particular provision in the tax code, Opportunity Zones, documenting their origin and impact. He has a reporters eye for detail, an ability to tell the story in an exciting way, but also blends in rigorous policy analytics and a certain degree of sympathy and open mindedness--while being willing to make the calls when they are obvious.
Opportunity Zones were a provision in the 2017 that allowed people to take capital gains and instead of paying taxes on them invest them in funds that invested in designated lower-income (sort of) areas with the gains deferred and (they hoped) permanently eliminated it. The idea was the brainchild of Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker who established a "think tank" (the Economic Innovation Group), drummed up bipartisan support, and got the idea enacted in record time in the 2017 tax cut. The bad press quickly mounted as many gentrifying and even rich areas were designated Opportunity Zones, connected people started profiting, and funds appeared to be going into expensive hotels, storage facilities and college dorms.
As someone that has worked on economic policy, both reporting and from within Brookings, Wessel brings a lot of insight into how ideas are fleshed out and defended. In some ways he is appropriately cynical, but in other ways he shows the ways in which the idea was, at least in part, well intentioned by its developers, promoter and legislators (and Parker himself does not appear to have profited at all from it). He does make the think tank policy industry sound a little more cynical than it deserves, I would also love to read a book on how the idea of a child allowance went from pipe dream to reality rapidly in part through think tanks and research in a manner that has some similarities but many differences from Opportunity Zones.
The first part of the book filled in a few holes in my knowledge (including some great stories, like Tim Scott in the Oval Office after Charlottesville using the opportunity to push President Trump on Opportunity Zones). But it got more interesting the second part where Wessel goes through the quirks of the process by which Treasury rapidly wrote rules on Opportunity Zones and the States implemented them with mixed results along with the many weirdnesses, quirks, accidents and malevolence that went into the process. Then he goes off to Portland, Baltimore and other places to examine project, finding that most of them would have happened anyway, did not appear to serve any particularly worthwhile goal, but in a few cases may have been consistent with the intention.
These anecdotes would be a wonderful complement to rigorous causal research, unfortunately there is none and given the paucity of data there may never be. But he cites evidence that Opportunity Zones have not raised housing prices, most did not get anything like the initial hype or even get anything at all, and most of the money went to gentrifying ones. All in all, the combination of anecdotes and evidence leaves one wondering whether a small fraction of the cost went to good or none of the cost went to good.
At the end of the day my own deep policy conviction is to be extremely skeptical of place-based policies and extremely skeptical of indirect policies that gives financial incentives to businesses or high-income people to do good things for others. The problem with place-based policies is they often do not benefit those in most need but property owners and in practice can be implemented in a highly politicized manner because nothing is more powerful for politicians than places. And then there is a parade of policies that are about indirectly giving incentives through corporations or high-income households to achieve goals (like the repatriation holiday), almost all of which beg the question of why not use the federal resources directly for whatever the purpose was.
A big advantage of giving money to people rather than places or high-income households is that it is hard to go badly wrong. If the government had spent the money on housing vouchers, for example, we might debate the finer points of whether they were optimally designed (e.g., whether and how to encourage mobility to high opportunity areas) but there would not be any doubt that the resources went to their intended purposes. Instead we are left with a triple bank shot of a policy that may have delivered a little to people who needed it while letting the most affluent take a huge cut.
Overall, a great case study in how Washington works, how tax policy works, and some of the challenges around promoting economic development through the tax code--highly recommended....more
I listened to this as an audiobook which is about the right way to read it—if you read it at all. There was a lot that was interesting but even more tI listened to this as an audiobook which is about the right way to read it—if you read it at all. There was a lot that was interesting but even more that did not work for me and may not work for anyone. I liked Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics somewhat more but that book also had shortcomings.
This book uses the dueling Newsweek columns by Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman to shape a narrative about their debate over the free market. It begins with short biographies of the beginnings of their careers, their similarities and differences, and the ways they crossed paths at Chicago that was mostly new and interesting to me. It then described their debates primarily over macroeconomic issues, particularly the role of fiscal policy, monetarism, the causes and solutions to inflation, most of which is not actually about the “free market” which is more of a microeconomic issue.
The pairing provided some narrative interest and it was nice to read (or, in my case, hear) some of the kind letters that Paul Samuelson wrote to Friedman and his wife Rose over the years, picturing a 70-year long friendship, debate, respect, and irritation.
But the pairing is an imperfect way to tell the story. For starters the book is primarily about the two economists’ impact on the public debate not their academic work. As such, Friedman looms much larger than Samuelson who devoted a larger fraction of his career to a much more impressive and lasting set of academic contributions. The book does not pretend to be an intellectual history but it is somewhat problematic that it writes out just about everyone else (James Tobin?) who was part of developing the ideas and participating in the debate.
The last third of the book is borderline dreadful, a potted history of economic events in the 1990s, 2000s, the financial crisis and COVID that neither Samuelson nor Friedman had much to directly to do with, most of which were presented in a relatively conventional and shallow manner in service of Wapshott’s thesis which he makes clear in the concluding chapter where he writes, that Friedman “ Laid the foundations for the election of President Trump. Could there have been a President Trump without Friedman? Perhaps. But Friedman’s long libertarian march helped pave the way.”
That argument conveniently blames Friedman for everything Wapshott does not like. But what if part of the 2016 election was voters frustrated by immigration, whatever Friedman’s views they were not influential on that topic. Or if 2016 was in part a reaction to the unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act, which could sort of be blamed on Samuelson (at least if you had to pick one of the two men to credit for it).
More generally, Wapshott appears to miss all the ways Friedman was vindicated, to name just one the idea of floating exchange rates untethered to anything was a kooky one in the 1950s and now is not even remarkable for advanced economies and the trend in policy advice to emerging economies too. Other ideas like occupational licensing were echoed by the Obama and Biden administrations. Or now the fully refundable child tax credit which is basically like Friedman’s negative income tax.
Moreover, Wapshott’s superficial potted history acts as if Friedman’s small government ideas won the day and have been strangling government ever since. While we do not have the government (or level of taxes) that I want, it is the case that the government keeps increasing its role in healthcare, mostly increasing it in anti-poverty programs, college financing, and a range of other areas—including regulations. If anything the trend seems to be against Friedman.
The above was all quite negative but half of the book is reasonably good, the half the sticks closer to the two men, their lives, their direct impact, and humanizes them and their interactions, providing the political and intellectual context for their ideas. It is just a shame that it came bundled with everything else it did that you could get anywhere and did not particularly need the framing of these two intellectual giants....more
This was two books in one: a pretty good memoir about aspects of life as an undocumented child of undocumented parents and set of portraits of undocumThis was two books in one: a pretty good memoir about aspects of life as an undocumented child of undocumented parents and set of portraits of undocumented Americans that are worth reading but less three dimensional than the author's stated aspirations.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio starts out angry at the thought anyone would even ask her to write a memoir, "A memoir? I was twenty-one. I wasn't fucking Barbara Streisand. I had been writing professionally since I was fifteen, but only about music--I wanted to be the guy in High Fidelity--and I didn't want my first book to be a rueful tale about being a sickly Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didn't have a Social Security number, which is what the agents all wanted." She then says she is going to set out to portray a set of undocumented Americans without burdening them with representation, instead portraying them as they are, including "warm, funny, dry, evasive, philosophical, weird, annoying, etc." I absolutely loved this introduction, it was what got me to read the book, and set a standard that also left me somewhat disappointed.
A lot of the book is indeed a memoir and a very good one. Cornejo Villavicencio's father comes across as every adjective above and more as he goes from a job as a taxi driver to delivery (where is he called a "delivery boy" even though he is a man) to restaurants. Her mother initially didn't work but has a bit of a feminist reawakening when she starts to work. And Cornejo Villavicencio herself never gets tuberculosis but struggles with migraines while her father has a prostate cancer scare and all of this is impacted by being undocumented in America. Finally, her younger brother was born in the United States making him a citizen and eligible to sponsor the others when he turns 21, although he is less of a character in the book.
The memoir content is interspersed around the journalism as Cornejo Villavicencio spends countless hours with different undocumented Americans, like day laborers in New York City and people getting asylum in Cleveland. In many ways the variety of places and people appear intended to be representational of undocumented immigrants--despite her protest otherwise in the introduction. And that really does lead to the problem she was trying to avoid, flattening them, making them types, representatives and victims of all of America's injustices. In some cases, they may be very realistic types, but in some ways not (only a couple dozen people are living in asylum in churches and she tells us about a thousand undocumented day laborers in New York, so those stories are interested but actually don't seem representative).
Finally, there is virtually nothing positive in the portraits and interactions in America. Maybe that is fair and true but one has the suspicion that amidst the genuine outrages in places like Flint (which she depicts), there genuinely are a lot of old-fashioned opportunities in America--of which someone like the author, a woman that graduated from Harvard and is now getting a Ph.D. from Yale--would actually be a good example of.
P.S. I listened to Cornejo Villavicencio's excellent narration of the audio book....more
Say Nothing is motivated by the famous quote (misattributed to Stalin), “a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” The tragedy at the center of this book is the IRA’s abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widow who left behind ten children. Patrick Radden Keefe starts his book with the abduction and then comes back to its aftermath later in the book. McConville is not the only tragedy Keefe shows, he provides painful color and background on a number of different individual murders by the IRA and the authorities, including several pre-meditated IRA “executions” as well as victims of terrorist attacks, victims of the British security forces and others (perhaps none more shocking than the British security forces protecting one of their double agents from being murdered by loyalists by instead getting the loyalists to murder another man who was picked solely because of the similarity of their last names, ending the life of a completely innocent father and grandfather).
Woven throughout the narrative are a few key characters that appear again and again: Gerry Adams (the IRA leader who becomes a political leader in Sinn Féin), Brendan Hughes (a top tactician for the IRA), Dolours Price (the scion of an IRA family, she starts out on a non-violent path but ends up joining the IRA), Frank Kitson (a British general leading counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland), McConville, and her children, and a few others characters—along with many thumbnail sketches along the way.
Almost everyone is presented without judgment, with lots of nuance and multiple perspectives—with the possible exception of Gerry Adams where Keefe pays lip service to the importance of his role in peace but emotionally the core of his portrayal is much more negative, a shady character who lies about his past with the IRA.
The story moves propulsively, almost like a thrilled with numerous twists and turns. For the first two thirds of the book you don’t even realize how all of the different people will end up being tied together in ways that I won’t spoil.
It also covers a lot of history but does it lightly, interspersed and woven in, that charts the phase of non-violent resistance modeled on Martin Luther King Jr. giving way to violence and then joining with a political struggle and finally turning into a pure political struggle—all juxtaposed against the deepening involvement of the British who sent troops, established internment camps, engaged in torture, and allowed their informants latitude to continue committing major crimes. (The book provides a lot of context and detail for the hunger strike that killed Bobby Sands and nine other men, an event that made a huge impression on me at age 10—like it did many people around the world.)
Perhaps most interesting, however, is the way that Keefe discusses the challenges of memory and accountability. About one-third of the book takes place after the violence largely ends and it is about how people explain to themselves what they did, how they explain to each other, and whether and how they seek accountability. Northern Ireland did not have anything like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that gave amnesty in exchange for an honest accounting of past crimes. In fact, ever having been a member of the IRA remained a crime and the charges hanging over people forced them into lies and contortions, but not holding them accountable has its own problems too.
Say Nothing mostly feels like it is about the past, a violent period of intense sectarianism that is at odds with the way one thinks of Ireland, and even Northern Ireland, today. It ends with a new generation taking over, people more prosperous and less focused on sectarian divisions, but still haunted by the past—and the possible destabilization of the fragile detonate by the new borders that are being set up as a result of Brexit.
Overall, this is a work of meticulous and seemingly fair-minded reporting, great story telling, both a particular time and place but also about humans and their relationship to violence and moral questions like whether the means justify the ends, all of it done by showing not telling. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
(I listened in rapt attention to the audiobook on four long drives, it was excellently narrated by Matthew Blaney who has a strong Irish accent that adds to the atmosphere of the book.)...more
Although ostensibly about the Twilight of Democracy, the strength of Anne Applebaum's book is that it focuses on one slice of this question and develoAlthough ostensibly about the Twilight of Democracy, the strength of Anne Applebaum's book is that it focuses on one slice of this question and develops it in a compelling and personal way: why do "clercs" (intellectuals or others who should know better) drift over to the becoming propagandists for authoritarian/populist/ultranationalist parties? The book begins with a party Anne hosted in Poland for the turn of the millennium and how twenty years later half of the guests are not speaking to the other half of the guests. The estrangement is over those who became propagandists for the Law and Justice party, becoming homophobic, anti-Semitic and getting lost in dishonest and vile conspiracy theories in the service of subverting democracy itself. This same parting of the ways happens over and over again to Applebaum--her scene in conservative British publishing where some go over to Brexit and some support the Orban in Hungary, her scene in conservative US publishing where some (e.g., Laura Ingrahm) go from mainstream-ish supporters of Reagan's vision to angry ranters.
Some of the conventional explanations for the rise of populism don't work in Eastern Europe, the heart of Applebaum's book, which was doing well economically and had very little immigration. She also argues against the idea that it is a revolt of the common people against the elites because all of the people she chronicles and is concerned with are and were elites. Instead she argues there is a "seductive lure" to authoritarianism (as in her subtitle) that appeals to people because it gives them simple, clear answers, good guys and bad guys, and gets rid of nuance and complexity. This combines with a nostalgia, which Applebaum argues can take the form of "restorative nostalgia," a pernicious notion of trying to recreate an imagined past. All of this is unleashed by social media, just like radio before it unleashed fascism.
The book moves between different countries. I learned a lot about Poland and Hungary, both because I only pay intermittent attention and because Applebaum knows so much. The Trump section (a lot of which focused on Laura Ingraham) mostly covered familiar territory. And the Brexit chapter was somewhere in between, and suffered a bit because however bad Brexit is it does not really mean the end of Democracy in anything resembling what is happening in Poland and Hungary.
The book does leaves me with a few questions:
1. Applebaum's story is asymmetric. David Frum and Laura Ingraham were at the same party and ended up in different universes, as did many others in the Polish right, the British right, etc. I can think of nothing comparable on the left (to be clear, I'm sure there are isolated examples, but not a party of leftists in 2000 where half of them are so extreme that they are not speaking to the other half). Does this mean that the polarization we are seeing is asymmetric? Is there something more about the right that leads to this mindset and authoritarianism? Needless to say, much horror in the twentieth century was perpetuated by people that came from the left (and chronicled in Applebaum's previous books), is it now the right that is slipping and if so why?
2. Relatedly, to what extent does the conservativism that Applebaum supports, that of Reagan and Thatcher, bear responsibility for what many of its successors morphed into? Was this an evolution or a repudiation?
3. Is Applebaum herself falling for the nostalgia and overly paranoid overstatements that she is so concerned about in others? I think probably not but one needs to worry when depicting a vision of past politics in which everything was (comparatively) wonderful.
4. Applebaum in some ways is a strange messenger because she lives in the US, UK and Poland and is a highly international elite. I mostly agree with her argument that populism is not a rebellion against elites (e.g., Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are not exactly men of the people), but I have a nagging worry that it does thrive on some concern about elites and their behaviors. Relatedly, Applebaum waxes nostalgic for what were essentially media controls forcing relatively conformity of the media, a narrow difference between political parties and the like, but doesn't this also have a downside?
5. What are they thinking? Applebaum tries to reach many of her former friends to understand why they are advancing crazy, patently false, conspiracy theories, that go against much of what they themselves used to believe. Almost none of them get back to her. One who does records it and publishes an edited version to show her defiance of Applebaum. Never do we learn what anyone was thinking beyond speculation by Applebaum or others close to those people (e.g., a pair of Polish brothers that go in different directions). I am not faulting Applebaum but this leaves me wanting more.
Overall, really well written, thought provoking, a learned a lot of specifics from her reporting, and also very thought provoking. My list of questions are not in the spirit of rebuttal, on many of them I think there is a good chance that Applebaum is right, but I am not certain and still want to learn more. Because after all, as she says, the world is a complex place and does not lend itself to overly simple explanations....more
As I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in EAs I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in Econometrica in 2019 finding that 20 to 40 percent of productivity growth in the half century following 1960 was due to “improved allocation of talent” as barriers to women, people of color and others were reduced—although not eliminated. Then halfway through the book Jim Tankersley takes a brief hiatus from narrative journalism to do an economics literature review—and begins it with this Hsieh et al paper. Which is to say, there his a lot of cutting edge economics and research underlying the moving and powerful stories Tankersley tells in the book.
Tankersley argues provocatively but persuasively that journalists have not neglected the white men that voted for Trump but in fact lavished attention on them, including the workers that Tankersley himself had quoted in his news stories. Instead it is women, minorities and immigrants who Tankersley argues have not been heard from enough—and who played a critical role in building the middle class and fueling American economic growth. Tankersley tells the story largely by drawing on his own reporting over the last fifteen years which takes places all across the country: New York, Chicago, Ohio, Winston-Salem, and Western Massachusetts among other places. He is interested in the jobs that have disappeared, the hollowing out of manufacturing and the middle class, and way obstacles were reduced in the 1950s and 1960s but then inequality emerged and grew as a major obstacle in recent decades.
I mostly agree with Tankersley’s arguments. I appreciated that for a book that focuses on inclusion and distribution, he appreciates and clearly shows the importance of aggregate productivity growth and the sources of that growth—both the obvious ones and the less obvious ones. At times Tankersley takes all of the most negative perspectives on his data without qualification/nuance (e.g., he’ll use statistics about record low job growth without pointing out how different today’s demographics are and does not mention that the negative growth of median income in various periods he cites was not true if you adjust for household size). I also think the book emphasized institutional explanations for inequality more but did not take the race between education and technology nearly as seriously—reducing it more to skill-biased technological change without the educational component. Finally, and this is more tone than anything, I didn’t love the identification of every economist by their race/gender, even on multi-authored papers and often Tankersley refers to the “economy” as if it had agency and its own villainy as opposed to be composed of all of us. Finally, I would have loved to hear more about the relationship between “economic” and “cultural” explanations of populism and Tankersley’s views, in particular, on the cultural debates around immigration.
All in all, however, the book demonstrates what happens when an intelligent, sympathetic journalist goes out and talks to both human beings and economists and does an excellent combination of the two in forging a powerful and important narrative about what went right and now wrong with the American economy and the real human consequences of these aggregates....more
The mere existence of Ezra Klein’s outstanding and compulsively readable account of the rise and consequences of polarization is a paradox. Klein creaThe mere existence of Ezra Klein’s outstanding and compulsively readable account of the rise and consequences of polarization is a paradox. Klein creatively synthesizes a wide range of social science literature, mostly from political science and social psychology, combing it with his own extensive first hand observation of American politics in a book that is sympathetic to a wide range of perspectives without suffering from the traps of naked partisanship on the one hand or false equivalences on the other.
Klein is clear that our polarization problem does not stem from too little information or too little exposure to the perspective of the other side. In fact he cites a set of social psychology experiments that show that people are more rationalizes than reasoners, that smarter and more informed people turn their intelligence and information into more grist for their previous views, and that exposing people to opposing perspectives turns them off to them and strengthens their own views.
And that is why the mere existence of this book is a paradox. It reasons instead of rationalizing. It aims to persuade rather than mobilize. And Klein exposes himself and the reader to the other side of just about everything, including a relatively sympathetic account of everything form how whites feel their historic privileges threatened to Mitch McConnell’s decision to block Merrick Garland. It is almost like the very act of writing this book is a rejection of its thesis, or at least a loud protest against it—both explicitly and in form.
Many people will likely come to this book after reading the New York Times oped version. I liked the oped, but one thing I appreciated about the book is that, unlike the oped, it spent the first ~85% on the topic of polarization without talking much if at all about the different ways that it has affected Democrats and Republicans. I think this is intellectually honest and (perhaps a foolish hope) may bring along a wider set of readers. This presentational choice also makes the last part of the book that shows how the Republican Party has become more of an “insurgent outlier” that is captive to something more like one group and one set of highly partisan media, that much more compelling.
There wasn’t much in the book I disagreed with. My main complaint is that I wanted more. Klein calls for more democratization but does not discuss his view on whether that might conflict with protections for minorities and if so how it should be handled. He does not talk about the right way to balance democratic and technocratic control. And the relationship between polarization and the delegitimization of elites is largely missing from his account.
Finally, to expand something I said in the opening paragraph, I think Klein is a model for how to use social science. Too many political reporters ignore it entirely. Or if they like data analytics, think they can figure it out on their own. Ezra reads widely, books and articles. He talks to the authors. And he takes it seriously. But he also does something the social scientists cannot do: he has talked extensively to many of the leading political players over the last decade. Not everyone could pull it off as well as he does, but I certainly wish more people tried and even got half of the way there, it would be an improvement on a lot of the gut instincts of many of the people opining today....more
An account of the aftermath of the closing of GM's plant in Janesville Wisconsin told through the stories of a variety of people, including a worker, An account of the aftermath of the closing of GM's plant in Janesville Wisconsin told through the stories of a variety of people, including a worker, the head of a training office, a teacher, a local banker, and more. Janesville is well told, moving chronologically to portray many different facets of the community, the different ways that different segments responded, and the few triumphs and some tragedies--one particularly poignant.
Although it is not a policy book, Amy. Goldstein does present her views at various stages, more about what not to do than what to do. She is very negative on community college and training programs, arguing that they train people for jobs that do not exist. The community college view seems more negative than the evidence warrants. The portrayal of the way already strapped states and communities bid for corporations makes your blood boil and wish for a European-style system that would ban this form of mutually inefficient competition. The image of how the social safety net gets devastated by the decline of charitable giving after a place is hit, compounding the problems, is painful--especially for the fact that public policy could easily solve it. But the fundamental problem of how to restore jobs or prepare people for other jobs is one that I still one that does not have a full satisfactory answer....more
I am very glad that “Winners Take All” was written and that it is being widely read in precisely the circles that need to read it. I could see it actuI am very glad that “Winners Take All” was written and that it is being widely read in precisely the circles that need to read it. I could see it actually making the world a better place. A lot of the reportage is excellent, in many ways looking from multiple perspectives, being as sympathetic as possible, and by virtue of that sympathy its criticisms are that much more biting and compelling. The weakness of the book, however, is the superficiality of its underlying analysis of the economy and politics. But that is much less important than its strengths and those strengths and very strong.
The target of “Winners Take All” is the “doing good by doing well” crowd. The people that populate the Aspen Ideas Festival (full disclosure, I go pretty much annually), flying out in private planes, talking about their minor initiatives that may by themselves do a small amount of good but leave the system itself intact.
It is easy to satirize this set but Anand Giridharadas doesn’t just do that. He conveys sympathy for their desire to change the world. His targets are less the people that populate the book than the system that puts them there and that they themselves reinforce.
Giridharadas’ argument is that all of the “doing good by doing well” efforts aren’t just harmless and slightly annoying, but profoundly harmful. They undermine the notion of democracy and collective governance. Instead of the government collecting taxes and democratically deciding what to do with them, plutocrats decide how much of their money to give and what to give it to. Giridharadas argues that these efforts can reinforce the bad aspects of the current system by allowing corporations and individuals to effectively whitewash their rent seeking and bad actions and argue they don’t need regulation because they’re busily making the world a better place.
To the degree that Giridharadas is portraying people who—for example—oppose the taxes needed to fund the types of issues they agree need more funding, I’m sympathetic to his perspective.
But I’m also much more sympathetic to capitalism than Giridharadas is and in some ways I find his views confused. Many of the CEOs that show up at the Aspen Ideas Festival touting their minor initiatives to train the disadvantaged are actually not talking about the biggest good they do in the world which is innovating in the core businesses, increasing productivity and wages, making products consumers want, and the like.
If that innovation is in the form of, for example, making better cigarettes or marketing them better that will make the world a worse place. But most of it isn’t and when it is the answer is regulation and taxes so that when businesses are maximizing their profits they are doing it in a way that increases social welfare. Giridharadas powerfully advocates for the stronger regulations and taxes, but still somehow often finds himself drawn into the argument that the solution is corporations being more communally oriented, caring more about the public good, and the like—without recognizing that this is an unrealistic basis to build a better society on and lends itself to precisely the “elite charade” that he is criticizing. Better corporations that are honest, saying all they care about is profits, so that it will be clearer that we need to set the rules so that their profit maximization is socially beneficial.
Often the solution is more market not less. The denizens of what Giridharadas calls “Marketworld” are themselves often unsympathetic to the market. Business leaders don’t love competition and run large centrally planned organizations. They can see this lack of competition and central planning as a model for society more broadly. The solution is not more planning but less, with greater competition within well-defined rules leading to the types of innovation we should want. We should be calling the “Marketworlders” on their bluff.
The question is whether all the superficial world changing stuff that I also find annoying suppresses these types of public policies. Some efforts at self governance, self regulation, and self donation are substitutes for collective action and, as a result, share Giridharadas’ concern about these. But I don’t think he does enough to grant the many ways that private action can complement the types of public action he supports. For example the business community doesn’t say it is sufficient for them all to use green lightbulbs but also is reasonably decent at advocating carbon taxes and supporting the Paris Agreement.
This point is indicative of some of the limitations of Giridharadas’ political theories. He depicts a world of a monolithic all powerful elite that wants to stamp out all use of the word “inequality” because it views it as threatening its own power and prerogatives. But the elite is not monolithic, in fact many of them actively support different sides of the debate, including many that actively support higher taxes on themselves. Nor is the elite all powerful, just witness Donald Trump getting the Republican nomination against the entire elite of the Republican Party and then winning the election. The elite wants all sorts of things, like immigration reform, that seem to never happen. Finally, it is not like the “people” are completely innocent. In Giridharadas’ telling, the elite are offended by talk of inequality and instead want to hear euphemisms like expanded opportunity. But much of the public has exactly the same preferences around framing nd is less excited about the term and concept of inequality than I personally am or think they should be
All of these arguments and quibbles, however, pale in comparison to the fact that the book aims at broadly the right target, hits it squarely, and might actually accomplish something in the process. There really is a bit too much of an “elite charade of changing the world”. And not enough actual engaging with the public policies that are needed to change the world. Giridharadas has written a compelling book that just might help to change that....more
This graphic novel tells the story of a Doctors without Borders staffer Christophe André who was kidnapped in the caucuses in 1997 and held for ransomThis graphic novel tells the story of a Doctors without Borders staffer Christophe André who was kidnapped in the caucuses in 1997 and held for ransom for four months on the margins of the war in Chechnya. It goes on for 400+ pages of relatively sparse prose and pictures depicting his day-to-day life, which basically involves being handcuffed to a bed, allowed a brief meal, and spending months without anyone who speaks French or English. As a result, he has no idea about any aspect of the ransom process beyond what he can infer from every few weeks something breaking the pattern (e.g., them taking a picture of him or taking him on a nighttime car ride). At times the book can get monotonous and repetitive, but in some ways this is part of the effect and only heightens the escape from the claustrophobia when he eventually escapes and finds people that he can sort of speak to. The brief epilogue was particularly moving....more
Annie Lowrey’s book is a beautiful example of combining the power and insights that come from telling people’s stories (aka journalism) with a wide raAnnie Lowrey’s book is a beautiful example of combining the power and insights that come from telling people’s stories (aka journalism) with a wide range of social science research, policy thinking and lots of passion for addressing injustice and making the world a better place. Her range is truly impressive: reporting from Maine to Kenya to India and on everything from AI to welfare programs to development economics. I learned new things even from the chapters I have thought a lot about (e.g., technological unemployment), was introduced to new ideas I have thought relatively little about (e.g., the intersection between this policy and race and gender), and it also made some aspects of the issue more vivid (e.g., the complexities of current welfare programs).
The argument of the book is simple—in fact all you need to do is read the title “Give People Cash,” or what goes by the name “Universal Basic Income” (UBI). While I am a skeptic on the idea overall (and Lowrey herself is unsure), I think the argument makes two important contributions—one one the wonky specifics and a second on the broader vision.
On the wonky specifics, Lowrey’s chapters on development assistance are spectacular and make a compelling case that if we just replaced all in kind aid (shoes, water buckets, and the like) with cash we would greatly reduce poverty—putting money in the hands of people who can’t afford to not spend it much more wisely than we could ever imagine for them. Similar reasoning would argue for a child allowance instead of a child credit in the United States. (Lowrey also advocates converting SNAP—or what used to be known as food stamps—to cash, a measure I am much less convinced of since the relatively small benefits from shifting from near-cash to cash seem dwarfed by the reduction in political support such a program might garner.)
On the broader vision, Lowrey makes a compelling argument for “the principles of universality, unconditional its, inclusion, and simplicity, and it insists that every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation.”
Lowrey’s book can be critical of some of the arguments for UBI. She is, rightly, much more concerned about the problems we face today like poverty than speculation about technological unemployment. While she is a strong advocate for universal programs, she is well aware of the fact that low-income programs have often gotten more political support/growth than universal ones.
Perhaps understandably for a book that is part reportage but also part argument and manifesto, Lowrey is not always as critical as might be warranted of arguments for UBI and larger claims for its impact while providing an overly optimistic take on policies to pay for UBI. Moreover, Lowrey only considers the monetary cost and does not address issues like: should someone who is unemployed for longer get more money than someone that is unemployed for less time, should parents of newborns get more than parents of sixteen year olds, should disabled Americans get more than others, etc., none of which would go away in a world of UBI. And much of the framing does not consider the opportunity cost, for example even if UBI does not discourage work is there another way to spend $4 trillion a year—or a subset of that amount—that would actually actively encourage it?
Only in one spot did Lowrey’s analysis, and the economics underpinning it, rub me badly in the wrong way: her treatment of what economists would call the incidence of public benefits. In places she laments the complexity of signing up for SNAP and other benefits, but in other places criticizes corporations for helping their workers sign up for these benefits (I would note no one ever criticizes corporations for helping higher-income workers sign up for their retirement, childcare and other government benefits). She also describes the existing social safety net as a subsidy to corporations while arguing that UBI would help bargaining power and raise wages—hard to see how both of these could be true. Why is SNAP an excuse for company’s to pay workers less but UBI would be a strike fund allowing them to bargain for more?
Overall, I don’t think the idea of UBI is ready for prime time and until Americans are willing to pay European levels of taxes it will be hard to support a universalist vision. But many elements of the idea are ready for prime time and expanding the understanding of what we could buy with a more universalist approach is a conversation we should be having—and one that Lowrey does much to advance....more
Wow, what a stunning book. As I read it I felt completely immersed in the seedy Boston underworld of the 1970s and 1980s and their corrupt relationshiWow, what a stunning book. As I read it I felt completely immersed in the seedy Boston underworld of the 1970s and 1980s and their corrupt relationship of gangsters and the FBI, whenever the present interrupted it took a moment to adjust back to it.
I was initially skeptical that I would want this much detail on something where I knew the general arc of the story (FBI gets Whitey Bulger as an informant, protects him in exchange, eventually it all comes to light, he flees, and they eventually track him down). Boy was I wrong: each and every detail was fascinating in its own right. At times it read like a thriller. But even more impressive is how it portrays the evolution of the four main characters: John Connolly the FBI agent who grew up with Whitey Bulger in Southie and protected him mostly as a result of boyhood feelings and the glamour associated a charismatic local boy; John Morris another FBI agent who was drawn into petty corruption, a few thousand dollars here and there, and only eventually rose above it; Steve Flemmi a brutal mobster at the intersection of the Irish and Italian gangs who actually did more informing than Bulger; and finally Whitey Bulger who is portrayed not as a "good bad guy" but someone who pushes drugs and murders women.
The authors did an impressive job pulling together an authoritative account with an enormous amount of detail--much of it relying on the extensive detail uncovered and documented by a series of Federal judges. We learn more about Morris's and Flemmi's thinking because they both testified extensively while Connolly and Bulger are a little more distant which is a shame but not something the authors could remedy (and in the case of one of them, can never be remedied)....more
An excellent journalistic account of the Arab Spring and its aftermath. It begins with the heady days of Tahrir Square in Egypt and also covers the evAn excellent journalistic account of the Arab Spring and its aftermath. It begins with the heady days of Tahrir Square in Egypt and also covers the events in Libya, Syria, Yemen and finally end on a more positive note with Tunisia. The first part of the book is "Revolts" and the second is "Restorations" and it provides a little bit of history, a decent amount of current events, and a lot of journalistic narrative around several people caught up in events--for example, teenage sunni and alawi girls whose friendship dissolves as the civil war develops, foreign fighters who join and then escape ISIS, villagers in Yemen seeking fairness, a more moderate cleric in Egypt, and many more. The book really humanizes events in a tragic and brutal manner, although ultimately ending with the comparatively successful reconciliation in Tunisia. ...more
Coco, Jessica, Mercedes, Serena, George, Cesar, Lourdes. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc does an amazing job bringing all of them--and dozens more--to life in tCoco, Jessica, Mercedes, Serena, George, Cesar, Lourdes. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc does an amazing job bringing all of them--and dozens more--to life in this nonfiction account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s. Written in extraordinary detail, sometimes mind numbing but that is partly the point, it often seems like a more rich and detailed account of their lives than I could possibly remember of what I did last week or the week before. The book begins in media res and ends abruptly, presumably more dictated by the author's writing schedule than any natural ending to the story--and it being real life there is no natural end to the story because it is not a story.
I appreciated that the book was written with no editorial commentary, no attempts to draw larger lessons, almost no links to the broader debates and changes going on at the time--except to the degree they were directly perceived and affected the participants (e.g., the work requirements in welfare reform). All of that made everything much more credible than if the author had an offer perspective. And, in fact, some of it is more complicated than one might think.
Even absent editorial commentary, many of the injustices of the system are completely apparent and it would take a hard hearted reader not to react with anger. At times I was uncomfortable being a voyeur, unsure if everyone wanted to be depicted in this way, and found the absence of the author in some ways odd--she describes every detail of Coco's day and everyone in her apartment, for example, except presumably for the several hours she spent talking to the author. And was she trying to help or just observing? No great answers to these questions and I certainly will not be the one to judge from a huge distance. But I admit to wondering.
This is one of the must reads of the last quarter century, I had been told to read it repeatedly but only finally got around to it. It is long, but every page is gripping and if there were another 500 or 1,000 pages covering the next 19 years I would read that immediately as well....more
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