It enumerates many of the causes or contributors to poverty, of which there are legion. All the ways it iA fantastic screed about poverty in America.
It enumerates many of the causes or contributors to poverty, of which there are legion. All the ways it is more expensive to be poor. The whole edifice of capitalism set up to leech the spirit from the downtrodden in the form of extortionate interest rates on payday loans, court fees, the cost of renting and so on.
That part is not especially unusual, especially if you're an NPR kind of liberal.
Where this book distinguishes itself is by then turning and pointing the finger directly at said NPR listener. You, covetous of your mortgage interest deductions, your subsidized employer-sponsored health insurance, the lower tax rate on your capital gains, your neighborhoods zoned for single family homes. These benefits to the middle and upper classes are the direct corollary to the social safety net that this country fails to provide the working poor. Even if you accept politicians' arguments that we just can't afford universal healthcare, child care, a UBI or what have you, you COULD fund those things, Desmond argues, if the middle and upper classes could be parted from their goodies.
Desmond further anticipates the usual rejoinder to an argument with this kind of moral clarity and lays out what the reader should do about it. Which is to say, a campaign to abolish poverty with the same enthusiasm and verve that was brought to the issues of abolition, universal suffrage and civil rights. A true war on poverty.
I see some reviews knocking the work as "cherry picking" statistics, failing to provide context, or ignoring political realities and power dynamics. I don't think any of that is true. It's a rare work which has a call to action for the reader that is actionable. How you receive it says a lot about you and I think that makes some uncomfortable....more
What does it feel like when a state goes mask-off fascist? What drives people to fight in hopeless armed conflicts? How do civilians wind up swept up What does it feel like when a state goes mask-off fascist? What drives people to fight in hopeless armed conflicts? How do civilians wind up swept up in wars when their coming (from our view half a world a way) was so obvious? Why don't they just leave?
Prophet Song takes the soft Western reader by the hand and shows you why and how. And it's devastating.
This is not a perfect book. Lynch's lyricism can be overwrought and at times repetitive. The story takes place in Ireland, but it's intended to be a generic stand-in for whatever liberal democracy you choose. I think choosing a white country shows a lack of trust in his audience, but maybe it does make it more accessible for some? I don't know.
However flawed, it was emotionally resonant to me. I could empathize with a parents' attempts to hold her family together in a world increasingly beyond her comprehension or ability to control. The way members of the family peel off one by one. The thought of having to do any of the horrible things Eilish had to do with a toddler in tow. I still like to think I would have had the foresight to get my family out of harm's way, but it's easy to see how it happens and how you fall into that trap.
It's not as though I don't know this is happening all the time. In Syria. In Gaza. In Libya. But as Lynch notes: "[T]he world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore."
You know these things happen all the time but you can't try and process it on a human, lived level all the time or it will consume you and destroy your ability to function. Reading Prophet Song can help widen that aperture for empathy for those who have stubbornly been keeping it closed....more
A pretty straight-forward pitch with this one... what if you took Flowers for Algernon... but instead of making a smart mouse you turned an autistic bA pretty straight-forward pitch with this one... what if you took Flowers for Algernon... but instead of making a smart mouse you turned an autistic boy concerned about the climate hell future and made him perfectly empathetic and sanguine about things?
I honestly really appreciated the tone of the book, which almost perfectly captures the modern condition (for those paying attention anyway) of deep sadness, disgust and regret mixed with an equal helping of hope, awe and wonder.
It's possible I am also particularly primed to receive its charms as a new father. I'm still only figuring out the mechanics of the role, but I struggle when I think about how I'm going to teach my daughter how to live in a world that I understand to be fundamentally broken and constantly changing for the worse.
I hope I'll be able to convey as much love and respect for our inner and outer worlds as Powers does even as I do the work of explaining tough truths....more
The United States is a great power in a state of decline. But what does that mean and how can we try and chart a course for the future with that in miThe United States is a great power in a state of decline. But what does that mean and how can we try and chart a course for the future with that in mind?
Lachmann takes an academic approach uses two main frames to address the problem: the politics of elites and the nature of hegemony. Looking at the main European powers of the last 500 years, he first breaks down why it was only the Dutch and the British -- and not the French, Spanish, Germans or Portuguese -- who were able to establish control of global commerce.
It starts with the idea of elites: power brokers in their various shapes who wield social, military and economic power separate from the ruler or executive. They can be merchants, landed aristocracy, capitalists, or whatever shape a society molds them into.
He differentiates the different trajectories of empires based on colonial elites' level of autonomy from metropolitan officials and colonial elites' influence on the metropole's economy and/or politics. In essence, as a country expands from a core to new lands, how are the spoils distributed? And does the colonial booty upset the system that facilitated its looting?
Why did Spain not parlay their American empire into global hegemony? The Hapsburgs inadvertently recreated their continental relationship with elites in their colonies by granting them self-contained encomiendas. These provided revenue independent from the state and left the state impotent to collect the spoils of colonization to the crown.
How did the Dutch become hegemons? Unifying elite control against Spain and maintaining control of colonial elite in the metropole. The Dutch hegemony was undermined because Amsterdam merchants developed multiple veto points within the Dutch polity and pursued their interests at the expense of other elites and the state, causing it to calcify against the British challenge.
The British hegemony was undermined by the elites in their American colonies attaining greater degrees of autonomy. Financialization of the empire bound things together for a good while, but ultimately altered the material conditions required to maintain an industrial and military base to rival continental challengers.
The American example seems to be following the British most closely. Lachmann argues that the elite shift undermining American hegemony since the end of WW2 stems from the consolidation of regional banks into regional conglomerates. This had the effect of turning the traditional federal pork system that benefited local constituencies into one that siphoned federal dollars into siloed business interests that exist independent of the electoral system. The benefits of empire go exclusively to the capitalist elite, where once there was a brief period where they were shared. Like the British, the final retreat of the hegemon seems to be into the financial realm, where American capitalist elites are basically stripping the copper out of the walls.
Lachmann cites cultural intolerance of war casualties, profligate spending on ineffective weapon systems, a bloated careerist officer class, reliance on contractors and strategies of neoliberal plunder as reasons for the declining effectiveness of the American military to sustain hegemony in recent wars. The military exists now to make money. Consequently it doesn't build things to meet the challenges of a 21st century military. And it raises serious questions about its potential effectiveness in a larger conflcit.
It's a pretty grim perspective, but it's also not totally clear that there is another wave of hegemony on the horizon to replace the U.S. As Lachmann notes, China appears to be most interested in maintaining their regional sphere of influence. But it will be interesting to see if the hegemony of the dollar is able to be maintained in our lifetime.
In terms of what kind of read this is... it's very academic, very formulaic, very dry. But fascinating!...more
I came upon Marc Reisner's classic work about Western water policy in a strange way. I was reading Paolo BaSo I guess I have opinions about dams now.
I came upon Marc Reisner's classic work about Western water policy in a strange way. I was reading Paolo Bacigalupi pulpy collapsnik work of fiction The Water Knife, where a weathered copy of Cadillac Desert features in the novel's many twists and turns. That book is set in a Gibson-esque vision of a backsliding United States, where internal refugees, corporations and cut-throat state and city entitities are pushed to physical confrontation over water rights for the Colorado River.
Given the context, I'm not sure what I imagined Cadillac Desert actually was, given that certain characters treated it almost like the bible. But Bacigalupi was clearly signalling that he at least thought the work was important.
And it's fascinating! It's sort of baked into American lore that Los Angeles is this ephemeral city of dreams built on hope, graft, the automobile and all the best and worst of 20th century American culture. But Reisner's work really underscores that it is, in a very physical, grounded sense, a home built on shifting sands.
Like OK... you live in 2023 and you understand that climate change has made fresh water much more precious. The world is heating up, so and and so on. But then you see this clear-eyed take from the 1980s -- when among the biggest concerns is the fucking U.S. budget deficit -- and he's talking about how the dams are silting up, the aquifers and reservoirs are being irreversibly salinated, and the future of American agriculture from the Great Plains westward is doomed. And he's talking about this without factoring in climate change. It really opens your eyes.
It's also incredibly illuminating in a vein similar to The Path to Power where he shines light on the almost comically corrupt system that underscored American water policy in the 20th century. Kicked off with the construction of the Hoover Dam in the New Deal era, the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers started building dams and water projects to spur irrigation-based agriculture and heavy industry in need of cheap hydroelectric power. But empowered by Congress, it quickly became a race between the two to see which could produce the most wasteful, unnecessary, ecologically devastating and poorly-constructed water projects they could. Why? Because what else are they supposed to do?
Some of the cul-de-sacs Reisner explores along the way are a little boring, not going to lie. There's only so many crewcutted Silent Generation psychopaths you can really process before your brain starts mushing them all together.
But the end result is a confirmation of an understanding I have long known gleaned from reading history: this country was founded on hubris, stupidity and graft. It developed on hubris, stupidity and graft. The vaunted post-War golden era this country supposedly had was a mirage born of circumstance.
The fact that we came of age in a world with no serious competition is what made the U.S. what it was. Plus the fact that North America was one of the few places left in the world with a frontier to develop. It was a wonderful opportunity. But we did it without a plan. Our system is incapable of sustaining long-term vision. Politicians can only see as far as the next election. The horizon for citizens is their personal enrichment and damn everything else.
So the result is that cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver and Las Vegas are still some of the fastest-growing places in the country. And they all depend on a dwindling water supply that is mostly being used right now to grow crops to enrich a few and the expense of the many. Using infrastructure paid for by the American taxpayer. That has a shelf-life of only a generation or two. What a system....more
I thought it was good! A Chinatown-style crime noir about the American Southwest collapsing under the pressures of water shortage, climate change and I thought it was good! A Chinatown-style crime noir about the American Southwest collapsing under the pressures of water shortage, climate change and organized violence.
The backdrop is honestly kind of unsettling in its vision of the future. It's a Gibson-esque take on a backsliding United States defined by internal refugees and states sparring over limited resources. Instead of Gibson's (likely more accurate) warring corporate states, Bacigalupi has the states themselves as the maestros and executors of organized violence.
The center of the book is Phoenix, which is being pressed by neighbors California, Las Vegas and a wave of humans fleeing unspecified disaster in what used to be Texas. Las Vegas is making moves to secure senior water rights to the Colorado River. Rumblings of papers securing water rights "senior to god" set in motion the plots events and ultimately bring the novel's characters together.
It's a gritty, grim vision to be sure. But honestly it's maybe the best use of a speculative future setting that I can recall reading in a good while. A lot of climate apocalypse literature leans on either science fiction to escape the bounds of physics or else goes the other direction into a return to primitivism. I think Bacigalupi's view of "now, but worse" is probably the closest to the truth. And like I said, it works for crime noir.
There are times with things get a little TOO gritty or salacious for my taste. The sex scenes felt a bit off to me. Some of the descriptions of violence were a little over the top or out there. But I kept turning the pages.
And lest you think that this violence-scarred vision of the future is unrealistic or at least a century away, the water level in Lake Mead is ALREADY lower than the panic levels Bacigalupi's characters react to in what is supposed to be a grim future. The grim future is now!...more
Human intelligence, and the big powerful brains that power human intelligence, might really have been an evolutionary mistake when you step back and tHuman intelligence, and the big powerful brains that power human intelligence, might really have been an evolutionary mistake when you step back and think about it.
That's essentially Vonnegut's thesis in Galapagos. The older I become and the more I learn about this grand human enterprise, the more I am inclined to think he might be on to something.
I will say that this is a pretty frustrating book to read from a structural point of view. It's not told in a straight-forward, cohesive narrative at all. Instead the narrator is the ghost of a man who was the son of another Vonnegut character. And in his death he has an omniscient perspective on both the main characters in the story as well as lesser bit players.
What makes it hard to follow is he jumps around so much in time and space... while at the same time largely staying grounded in a single hotel in Ecuador in the 1980s. Given all the leaps, you keep expecting the future events he eludes to actually... you know, happen. But it's not until Book 2 that you actually make it to the Galapagos and that part of the story is vanishingly short.
I suppose for an author as prolific as Vonnegut, this kind of playfulness is fun. But as a reader it kind of comes across like he's toying with you.
Still, I thought the book was pretty funny all told and I enjoyed his philosophical ruminations, cynical and self-indulgent as they were....more
It's really remarkable how a book written in the 1950s expressing a fear of nuclear annihilation could feels so evocative of this moment in 2022 — botIt's really remarkable how a book written in the 1950s expressing a fear of nuclear annihilation could feels so evocative of this moment in 2022 — both of the unchecked global pandemic as well as the looming climate catastrophe.
On its own terms, On The Beach is an interesting and compelling scenario. The long-feared missile exchange between nuclear powers renders the entire northern hemisphere uninhabitable to humans. Our characters live in Australia, and they are passive observers as the clouds of radioactive dust slowly wind their way around the globe, drifting south of the equator in an unrelenting but predictable path of doom.
The book itself is less about the heroic actions of any one character trying to hold back the inevitable than it is an exploration of the various ways that humans might respond to the specter of death. Almost uniformly, people still spoke and dreamed about an optimistic future that their rational minds knew was beyond their ken. People still went to work and did their jobs right up to the end almost because what else is there to do?
As people reconciled with their fate, more and more people turned towards the things they always wanted to accomplish. Fixing up their farm. Expanding their garden. Learning how to drive a Ferrari. All the things prudence kept them from fell away in the face of the inevitable. Shute even captured the phenomenon of denialism and the cranks who peddle it, though thankfully that stayed in the background.
If I have any criticism of the book, it's more in the very 1957 morality captured in amber by Shute in the form of a U.S. Navy officer who, in trying to cope with the death of his wife and two children, chastely refuses to sleep with the Australian woman who becomes his friend and close acquaintance right up until the end. Why, man?
In any case, this book felt cathartic to me because it really captured that juxtaposition so many of us have lived with for the past two years where your life is sort of proceeding as normal even as millions die needlessly and the specter of pain and death also seems to be lurking just off the horizon. It lets you really feel those feelings and I appreciated it all the more for that....more
A fascinating bit of early post-apocalyptic fiction made all the more fascinating every time you remember that it was penned in 1949.
The short versionA fascinating bit of early post-apocalyptic fiction made all the more fascinating every time you remember that it was penned in 1949.
The short version: a pandemic wipes out the vast majority of humanity, leaving a vanishingly small number of humans to inherit the earth. Pretty boilerplate plot by 2022, but there are many things that make it different:
* There are no zombies. No rabid mutant dogs. No marauding gangs of flesh-eating cannibals a la The Road. No mushroom clouds. No aliens. There's no great visceral threat terrorizing humanity. Civilization ends and... that's it mostly.
* It's a virus that does in mankind, but really it's more about nature. Stewart depicts several waves of ecological cliffs where animals from ants to rats to dogs seize the opportunity of humanity's end to consume the now-abundant resources, build up huge populations, and then ultimately suffer huge population crashes when they have exceeded the natural carrying capacity. This something I recognize from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, and Stewart's parallels to modern human overshoot are explicit and clear.
* It's also about fragility of humanity. Not in the sense that our relationships with on another are fragile, so much as that the infrastructure that composes so much of our waking reality and comfort is ephemeral and Will Not Last. The book is a slow motion thought experiment about which things will fall apart first and how that impacts survivors. Frankly it's extraordinarily generous in its timeline for how long car batteries, bullets and canned food continue to be useful.
* The main arc of the story is about Ish and his obsession with figuring out a way to shepherd his knowledge from the Old Times to future generations of humanity. He is the only thinker in his small tribe and he tries to impress upon his people the importance of having a long horizon on planning. And, amusingly to me, the lesson seems to be... don't bother!
Given what I have written out here, it's weird to say that I almost found the book optimistic, but I really did. Perhaps it's the product of the post-war America in which it was released, but to have someone contemplate an apocalypse for humanity where life on Earth just kind of... goes on is remarkably refreshing.
We just don't have that today. A lot of post-apocalyptic literature reflects anxieties about certain facets of modern life. And many deeply cynical works seem critical of the very soul of man itself, given what we have seen humanity is capable of in the 20th century. At the very least, modern depictions are compelled to bake in some kind of punishment for what we have done to nature. Somewhat ironically, Stewart's main character offhandedly dismisses the study of "climactical change" as irrelevant and impractical to everyday life, which certain reflects the time it was written.
Overall though, I really liked it. If the world had to end, I would take great comfort in the thought that the Earth Abides as Stewart draws it....more
Make no mistake. While this is technically a work of fiction featuring a telepathic gorilla, it's really just the thin veneer for author Daniel Quinn Make no mistake. While this is technically a work of fiction featuring a telepathic gorilla, it's really just the thin veneer for author Daniel Quinn to convey an argument. It so happens that I found this argument particularly compelling, because I inhaled it in 2-3 days, but let's see if I can boil it down.
Quinn looks at humanity's central problem as it appeared in the late 20th century. Namely, that Western society appears to be on a collision course with catastrophe. The rate at which humans are consuming the world's natural resources, turning them into poison and pollution, and extinguishing the diversity of life on planet Earth is increasing exponentially. And despite a brief moment of rebellion in the 1960s, those in the West are both aware of their doom and feel utterly incapable of doing anything to change course.
A believer in the transformative power of culture and great ideas, Quinn wants to set about questioning the dominant assumptions that under-gird our modern ideology (he calls it Mother Culture) to see if we can tell a story that would instead prompt humans to action.
There are two groups of people, he argues, the Takers and the Leavers. The Leavers he identifies as indigenous and native peoples that lived in concert with their natural environments. They might be hunter-gatherers, herding peoples, basic agriculturalists or some combination thereof, but their defining feature is that they only take what they need to live and don't extinguish competitors, either human or animal.
Takers are the group that dominate the globe today. Born of the original agriculturalists in the fertile crescent, their central belief is that Earth belongs to humans. As such, they declare war on any human or animal that stands in the way of getting as many resources as they can possibly get. It's not just the theocrats who he is talking about here, who believe that man was created in the image of God. Even modern man, with the belief in evolution, still see man as the culmination of the evolutionary process. And believe further that technology will truly enable us to grow indefinitely on this finite planet.
Quinn would have us return to a culture that has respect for the natural world and is culturally content to live within the limits prescribed by nature. I happen to agree! Driven by non-renewable amounts of fossil fuels, the human population is experiencing overshoot -- something seen at the population level all the time in nature. A surge in resources fuels a surge in the population. But eventually all the resources are consumed and the population has to experience a massive die-off to return back in line with natural limits. The problem for humanity is that it appears that we're going to take the rest of the modern natural world along with us in this crash.
Quinn's reasoning is not without flaws. I think there's a strong argument to be made that he is fetishizing the lives and culture of native peoples. The genocide they experienced is a tragedy, but it's a bit presumptive to say they would always have lived within the boundaries of the natural world. That's something we simply don't know. Perhaps the emergence of Taker culture is somehow baked into the human experience? Certainly though they offer an example of how humanity could have lived differently.
I'm also not sure what to make with his arguments about overpopulation. It's true what he says that no amount of food production has ever prevented hunger completely and that increases in production just lead to a larger population scraping by at the subsistence level. But I've also never heard someone ID overpopulation as THE issue without gracelessly slipping into eugenics or talks of genocide. I just don't know how you let the air out of the population balloon.
I don't think this book was wholly successful. As someone who generally agrees with Quinn, I didn't find many of the answers I needed to shake myself out of a morose inaction. And based on the 1-star reviews I see aplenty, there are lots of folks who still believe in the myth of progress and that we can just technology our way out of most problems. So... a good try and an engaging read, but it didn't quite get there....more
When you think of climate change, the image it evokes in the affluent west is a vision of coastal retreat in the face of rising seas. The first part oWhen you think of climate change, the image it evokes in the affluent west is a vision of coastal retreat in the face of rising seas. The first part of David Wallace-Wells' grim but gripping catalog of our environmental future is a list of other well-known disasters that await, but that for whatever reason tend not to come to mind immediately when one conjures climate.
There's heat. The number of wet-bulb days is poised to increase dramatically, possibly rendering most of the equatorial regions of the world virtually uninhabitable for large portions of the year.
There's hunger. Rising temperatures result in declining crop yields and projections say we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed by 2100 with yields simultaneously dropping by 50 percent.
There's drowning. Even a two-degree increase in temperature, now considered virtually inevitable at this point, would increase sea levels by six feet. This is virtually genocidal change for low-lying and island nations and even for the wealthy regions of the world means decimated infrastructure and a huge climate refugee problem.
And wildfire! There's really no such thing as a wildfire season in the American west anymore. It's just a constant state of burning.
And natural disasters. Our worst years for typhoons and hurricanes will come to see normal as soon as 18 years from now. There's also rain bombs, tornadoes, blizzards, river flooding and so on.
What about freshwater? We're already squandering huge portions of the earth's supply Already 2.1 billion people don't have access to safe drinking water. Now turn off all the natural water systems that rely on glacier melt and you get...?
Dead oceans. The oceans already absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and heat, acidifying the water and wreaking havoc on fish stocks that make up a fifth of all animal protein consumed by humans. And beyond killing life in the ocean, we run the risk of breaking systems like the Gulf Stream that govern our weather.
Air pollution. High CO2 concentrations are known to be associated with declines in cognitive ability. Imagine a world also choked by constant fires and dust from frequent droughts. That's good for us, right?
Plague! Forget COVID, who knows what bacteria and viruses await us locked into the permafrost just waiting to come out?
Economic collapse. One of the cool ironies of fossil capitalism is that it both abets climate change and may, ultimately, be destroyed by the monster it facilitated.
War! Resource scarcity, famine and climate migration seems poised to facilitate more war. The evidence suggests it is already doing so in areas like Yemen and Syria, which we nonetheless pretend are merely political or ethnic conflicts.
And let us not forget that all of these effects are interrelated and in many cases mutually reinforcing.
The second half of the book gets a little more esoteric and dives into topics like the political responses to climate change, the techno-futurist koolaid drinkers who think they can build an app to survive climate change, personal vs. political responsibility, the myth of progress, and the various ethical responses to climate change, from nihilism to hedonistic quietism to the various doomsday cults that are likely to come. All inadequate to the moment but reflections of our current attempts to cope.
Amusingly, the afterword goes on to note that even the very mildly optimistic crescendo in the original book was probably too optimistic and the reality we've seen in the years since 2018 has been less than encouraging.
Look, this is a depressing book. If you do any regular reading about climate change, it's not totally new. But I did find the totality of it to be refreshingly candid. I don't know who I would recommend it to though....more
Reporting from the front lines of the world's (in)action on the issue of climate change. Goodell bounces around the globe from Miami to Venice to the Reporting from the front lines of the world's (in)action on the issue of climate change. Goodell bounces around the globe from Miami to Venice to the Marshall Island's to Tom's River, New Jersey, to go through all the ways humans are attending to rising seas.
It's quite depressing on the whole, as you'd probably imagine.
In the American context, the issue is defined by radical denialism (see: Norfolk and the Congress restraining the military's ability to adjust) and straight-up delusion (see: Miami). Where climate change is address at all, it's always discussed as being far off in the future and of inflated proportion. All while the effects of rising seas are ever more abundant. We Americans are frogs comfy in our pot on the stove, oblivious to the temperature rising.
Elsewhere in the world, climate change is an acknowledged orthodoxy, but it's still a vehicle for graft (see: Venice) or an acceleration of wealth inequality (see: Lagos and the water slums).
It's a spectacularly gloomy picture, made moreso when you remember that for the most part Goodell is only focusing on the specific issue of sea level rise. He mentions second-order effects like droughts and more damaging storms, but only really in a coastal context. Also this was reported in 2017, so the reality is even worse than we imagined at the time and likely to become moreso.
I appreciated the zippy reporting though, especially in the in-depth look at the absolute schizophrenia of the folks running and managing Miami-Dade County, America's canary in the lunatic coal mine....more
You read Kim Stanley Robinson more for the big ideas than the specifics of the story. And for a book about climate disaster, this book is loaded with You read Kim Stanley Robinson more for the big ideas than the specifics of the story. And for a book about climate disaster, this book is loaded with big ideas.
Pumping water from under the glaciers of Antartica to slow the loss of the ice sheet? Yup. Reflecting the sun's rays with airborn sulfur dioxide and yellowing the ocean? Sure, why not. Air travel by jet being replaced by air travel via dirigible? Yes, of course.
But what separates Robinson from the other idea sci-fi guys like Neal Stephenson is his political big ideas. He credits two big things with halting the climate crisis.
First there's the creation of a block-chain based carbon coin that is granted by the world's central books for sequestering carbon.Using a market mechanic to reward healthy climate outcomes. It's like getting a free bitcoin every time you sequester a ton of carbon. Or more to the point, a bitcoin for all the oil, coal and other fossil fuels you leave in the ground unburned. It feels like a huge idea, though it is a little dispiriting that it requires the secret rulers of the world to authorize it.
The other thing was targeted violence by extremist groups. How do you get people to stop flying in business jets? Blow up the business jets. To stop eating beef? Threaten to infect the world with mad cow disease. To stop shipping goods on super tankers? Sink the super tankers. Whether this was his intention or not he certainly makes a persuasive argument for revolutionary violence. So there's that.
I do thing the ideas of the Robinson reading experience are the main thing, but his storytelling was reasonably sharp here. The first chapter about a climate disaster in India arresting and memorable. The rest of the central narrative is a big disconnected and feels almost incidental, but it was pleasant enough. I'd love to visit Zurich, but reading about it seems like the next best thing....more
Attenborough combines his life's work as a broadcaster and natural historian with an urgent call for action on climate change.
The first section of theAttenborough combines his life's work as a broadcaster and natural historian with an urgent call for action on climate change.
The first section of the book basically just recounts his career and the changes he's seen in the natural world in his lifetime. There are sections that read how his broadcast voice sounds. It's uncanny.
The second two-thirds is where he basically calls for a "re-wilding" of the planet as a method for capturing carbon and creating a more sustainable future for humanity.
He touches on the urgent requirements of the challenge of climate change, but it's pretty clear that he's holding back on a lot of the apocalyptic aspects of the situation so the reader isn't left with negativity.
It's a pretty OK book. I like the optimism of his vision even as I clearly note the absence of the necessary political dimension....more
I picked this off the shelf at work simply because the question asked in the title is something that I have been grappling with myself since I came inI picked this off the shelf at work simply because the question asked in the title is something that I have been grappling with myself since I came into adulthood in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. To my surprise and delight, Kuttner's analysis exceeded my expectation for the clarity of his argument, the quality of his writing and that all-important mixture of realism and cautious optimism about the future.
The first section of the book delves into the history of the global world order as created in the wake of World War II. Kuttner describes the form of egalitarian capitalism crafted by the FDR administration as a "fragile miracle," a creation of both luck and circumstance. The power of labor was cemented for a time when they agreed to no-strike provisions to support the war effort. Government spending for the war created full employment -- something that was extended in part by the Cold War. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act shackled private finance by divorcing brokerages and investment banks from commercial banking. Negative interest rates and high marginal taxes on the wealthy reduced inequality.
He also lays out the situation in Europe. In Britain for example, strong capital controls and a wartime-sized state are why Britain was able to emerge from the debt of the 1940s with a growing economy and strong welfare state. In the European case, it was understood that the global order included a respect for national protection and regulation of home-grown markets.
The tipping point came in the 1970s, when an economic slump precipitated by OPEC gave financial elites the leverage they needed to push deregulation. The U.S. could have continued a version of its successful form of managed capitalism, but instead chose to follow the self-defeating model pioneered by the British when they were global hegemons by unilaterally pursuing "free trade" in a world where almost nobody else was. The irony of course being that it led to the U.S. usurping the mantle of world leader.
Kuttner makes a really compelling argument comparing how the U.S. deliberately sacrificed its manufacturing sector by refusing to protect it using conventional managed capitalism. We're often fed the line that once the the globalism ball gets rolling, it becomes inevitable and the polity is powerless to resist. But if U.S. politicians have been so powerless at promoting the interests of American manufacturing abroad, what explains the relative success of American moves to deregulate finance?
And if they're successful at deregulating finance abroad, what else could the American juggernaut elect to change should it so choose?
"Today is it not communists, but capitalists, who are seeking to impose a single economic model on the globe. On balance, the institutions of global governance tend to reflect and reinforce rather than challenge that dominance. Globalism has been great at advancing the interests of capital and feeble at defending or enlarging the domain of human rights. The home of democracy -- or antidemocracy -- continues to be the national polity."
Which brings us to modern times. Kuttner picks apart "Third Way" style politics in both the United States and its copycats in Europe. You can argue that pro-capitalist "moderate" politics from the Clinton era through Obama might have been necessary given the political climate of the 80s and 90s, but Kuttner argues they want farther than they needed to. And by betraying the working class, leftward flank of their party they open the door for those same voters to be energized by a xenophobic right-wing.
And then of course Trump, where the book begins and ends. Why did Trump win in 2016? Kuttner lists many factors: Hillary's failure to recognize victims of economic collapse, the replacement of class issues with identity issues, Democrats' obesiance to finance, the self-reinforcing cycle of low voter turnout, the decline of popular groups (especially labor), and Republicans' pursuit of gridlock for the purposes of making government seem worthless.
This was written well before the 2020 primaries spun up, but Kuttner says that a progressive populist left is the only way out of the hole the country is in. You have to offer a concrete public program for disaffected working class workers. You have propose and reinforce public benefits that can restore people's faith in the government. If people find the status quo untenable and your program proposes more of the same (or I suppose in Joe Biden's case, a pledge to go back to 2016), people are going to vote for a change agent.
Buddying up with Wall Street is an impossibility. Finance needs to be strongly restrained. A strong public works program to rebuild American infrastructure and that prioritizes American business could offset some of the ravages of unregulated trade. Again, the fact that politicians have succeeded at deregulating finance abroad shows that we still have power to write the rules if we consider it in our interest.
And maybe most urgently, Kuttner says that this change has to come from the U.S. The European Union as an institution is largely a client of undemocratic global finance. The ability of individual countries to manage their own economies has proven to be stymied -- and not just the Greeces and Spains of the world but France as well. Their flirtation with right-wing fascism is perhaps more justified.
But the U.S. is one country. We can write our own collective rules. So far structural liberal norms have been tested by the Trump administration (and years of erosion by traditional conservative Republicans) but have held. The EU, governed as a body only economically, is vulnerable to the worst of both worlds.
So it's all on us guys! The end result is a book that reads like a pep talk for the progressive left for 2020, but really I think it's objectively fair to say that the stakes are this high and the evidence lined out for the argument are compelling....more
Did you ever feel the urge to sneeze and you go through the whole preamble, freezing for a second, grabbing a tissue, taking a big inhalation and... nDid you ever feel the urge to sneeze and you go through the whole preamble, freezing for a second, grabbing a tissue, taking a big inhalation and... nothing happens? And somehow you felt a little worse for not having sneezed? That's probably the best analogy I can give for reading Jared Diamond's latest book Upheaval.
The essential premise is to take the 12 factors identified by crisis therapists as factors for whether an individual will succeed at resolving a personal crisis and apply them to situations faced by a variety of countries throughout history. The idea is to explore how and why some countries succeeded at addressing crisis situations where others failed.
Those 12 factors are (with national crises analogs in parenths): 1. Acknowledgement that one is in crisis (national consensus) 2. Acceptance of one's personal responsibility to do something (national responsibility) 3. Building a fence, to delineate one's individual problems needing to be solved (national problems) 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups (help from other nations) 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems (other nations as models) 6. Ego strength (national identity) 7. Honest self-appraisal (national self-appraisal) 8. Experience of previous personal crises (previous national crises) 9. Patience (dealing with national failure) 10. Flexible personality (national flexibility) 11. Individual core values (national core values) 12. Freedom from personal constraints (geopolitical constraints)
Obviously, this framework only really works in analogy. How do you measure a sense of national identity? How many people have to take responsibility for something to constitute a national sense of responsibility? Diamond acknowledges the potentially problematic use of literary license in the introduction, so I was at least willing to tolerate it at first, assuming that the framework was just the means to get at an incisive conclusion about the current situation in the United States and globally.
The problem is, it lands like a wet fart.
His chapter on the United States does accurately describe both the strengths and weaknesses in its current state, I'm not saying that. He describes everything from our abundant natural resources to our democratic traditions to our enormous economy. And he also points out impediments to democracy like gerrymandering, voter suppression and the problem of money in politics as well as larger issues like growing income inequality and a wavering commitment to education.
But the problem is he spends the whole book setting up this elaborate and inherently flawed framework for assessing how a country will handle crises and it winds up feeling superfluous in the end.
Among the advantages he cites: strong national identity, flexibility inherent in our democratic tradition, freedom of action given by our friendly neighbors and two oceans. Among the disadvantages: unwillingness to accept responsibility, inability to make an honest self-appraisal, unwillingness to learn from others, and intolerance of failure. He spends like six pages on this and you read the pages and you think to yourself... yeah? So what? There's not much in the way of prescriptions. No bold vision for how the country can take on these intractable problems.
This wishy-washy conclusion would probably be more palatable if the whole work itself wasn't fraught with so many problems along the way. It's been well-documented, but there are a number of simple factual errors in the text. Not to mention a lot of abbreviated accounts where Diamond takes a strangely American stance. There are a number of examples, but top of mind are his strange false equivalence between the Allende and Pinochet regimes in Chile, his unwillingness to point out the obvious American involvement in Indonesia's coup in 1965, and this Cold War-era lack of acknowledgement of U.S. faults. He's got a whole section on how countries have to accept responsibility for what they have done and he scarcely mentions the ruinous effects of American foreign policy and global capitalism since WW2 except for a couple mentions of Vietnam.
A major problem with the book too is also how intensely personal it is. Seemingly the only reason he even adopted the crisis therapy frame is because his wife is a clinical psychologist. He picked the countries less for the examples they offered for the points he was trying to make than that they are countries that he has personal experience with and anecdotes about. Instead of citing research or other work in footnotes to the book, he will often cite anonymous friends and colleagues as sources for claims as bold and wide-ranging as how the entire nation of Chile felt after Salvador Allende killed himself. And this is saying nothing of Baby Boomerisms about how kids these days just lack social skills and that people on the internet are mean. It's just weird.
Now, I'm not going to say that I didn't enjoy certain parts of this book. I'm a Political Science major, so comparative politics is kind of my jam, flawed though these works usually are. There is a lot I didn't know about Finland and Indonesia in particular that I picked up quickly through those chapters. But given the flaws I found in the chapters about countries I am familiar with, there is a big fat shadow of doubt thrown across the whole thing.
Do I hate the book? No. Could I recommend it in good faith to just about anybody? Unfortunately, I don't think so....more
I read Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in high school, right in the middle of the invasion of Iraq. At the time I remember being anI read Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in high school, right in the middle of the invasion of Iraq. At the time I remember being angry that more people weren't telling the truth about what the war meant, even as I gave my own tacit support, implicitly believing the untruths about weapons of mass destruction.
That was more than 15 years ago now and I've read a lot more and my skepticism about the American project is now grounded in both first-hand observation as well as the classics. I have a whole Goodreads shelf dedicated to American Empire after all!
But there's still a soft spot in my heart for writers like Hedges who seem to look at everything around them with a turned up nose, seeing moral and physical decay in everything. Because I still agree with a lot of what he says. And I still think it's a shame that so many people believe the fairy tales about the American dream, though that is obviously changing.
I think the problem with America: The Farewell Tour is that Hedges is trying to execute his same old shtick during a time (a presidency?) where anybody of a liberal persuasion is already inclined to see the negative in everything around them. I don't need you to tell me about the crises of climate change, opioids, mass shootings, obesity, gambling and war — I work in a newsroom and I read about that shit every day! Everybody does.
And it seems as though in Hedge's attempts to out-gloom the prevailing gloom, he went out on a limb a little bit in some areas that wound up feeling weird and sort of lazy.
For example, he aims to tackle pornography in a chapter titled "Torture." To prove how pornography is evidence of the moral decay of the west, he goes to a BDSM club somewhere and describes the weird scene in pages and pages of explicit detail. So much detail, in fact, that it begins to feel a little bit like he is enjoying shoving the reader's face in it? Then he tries to make a flimsy link between BDSM, pornography and rape, saying, "Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape, and gang rape."
Except even a cursory search of the statistics shows that's not true. The rate of rapes in the U.S. has crept back up since a low in 2013, but it's nowhere near what it was even in 1990. And that's even as a larger cultural movement has come about explicitly encouraging victims of rape to come forward — where many in the past would never have sought justice or be counted.
That's not to diminish the related issues like the trafficking and exploitation of women and children for the purposes of pornography and prostitution, but trying to link those things to the behavior of consenting adults strikes me as both moralizing and lazy. Especially for a topic like pornography, which seems to be fueling a sea change in the way that young people relate to one another physically and emotionally. If you're looking for signs of decay, the corrosion of that kind of intimacy would be a fruitful line of inquiry. But Hedges misses it completely in his zest to describe pornographic acts.
Some of his other lines of attack also fell a little flat to me. I think he might have had the germ of something interesting when he started attacking the hedonism and empty self-worship at the core of more liberal forms of spirituality. But it was less than half-baked. It's not enough to gesture at cosmetic surgery and narcissism in a paragraph or two and call it a religion.
"The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often psychopaths." This is a great point! But you can't just drop it in there and not develop it.
It was also striking the way he dismissed "identity politics" out of hand. In this case, I happen to agree that a larger class consciousness is probably the more fruitful area of political change rather than focusing on the grievances of specific groups in isolation from others. But not only did he not define the term, but simply blowing off the legitimate concerns of people of color and the LGBT community because their priorities aren't the same as yours is again quite lazy.
And in the conclusion he ends with a whole list of policy sea changes that he says are definitively going to happen, but you get the sense that he doesn't actually believe it. At least on this point, I find it hard to disagree with him, because while we can sort of sense the broad outlines of what needs to happen in terms of developing new community structures separate from the decaying outline of American empire, we're not going to be the ones to build them and it's impossible to anticipate how they're going to happen. Still half-baked, but I have to give him a pass there.
So overall, lots of negativity, most of it justified, but sprinkled with some jarring assumptions and leaps of old man logic that make Hedges seem slightly disconnected from reality. The book was still a healthy dose of political reality, but I have to give it two stars instead of three for one main reason.
The most interesting prose in the book is easily the passages that he lifted wholesale from other writers. (With attribution! That's an important thing to note for a guy rightly accused of plagiarism -- something he never addresses by the way!) I get why he structured things this way, particularly since much of this book is based on blogposts he wrote for TruthDig, but this isn't a college term paper. This isn't aggregation. It strikes the reader — like many of his unsupported suppositions — as lazy.
Still, if I was going to hand somebody a book to get them into my headspace about American empire, I may yet hand them this book — two stars or no....more
Since the financial crisis in 2008, I have read many, many books about the American Century and the widely-shared perception that American Empire is iSince the financial crisis in 2008, I have read many, many books about the American Century and the widely-shared perception that American Empire is in the midst of a terminal decline. But never have I read nearly so cogent an explanation of both the rise of American global dominance and a blueprint for its end.
To be clear, McCoy touches on many familiar topics hit by books on my bookshelf. The rise of China, the rot of America’s heartland wrought by global capitalism, the looming specter of climate change — all those are present and accounted for.
But what really makes this book a success is the larger framework that McCoy assembles to tell the story, borrowing heavily from Halford Mackinder’s theory of the Geographical Pivot of History.
The gist of it is that there are two principle models of empires vying for global domination. There are land powers, anchored in the richly-appointed Eurasian landmass (or World-Island) around which the world turns. From its heavily-defended position, such a land power — whether Russia, the Soviet Union, a Russo-Germanic alliance or modern China —can control a plurality of the world’s resources, creating an empire of the world.
Traditionally, this land power has been checked by a maritime power whose greater mobility and control of the axial points of the World-Island both in the west (Europe) and in the east (Japan and the South China Sea) allows it to counter the land power. This role has been played by European naval powers — most especially Britain — as well as their successor hegemon in the United States.
The fight of the 21st century, then, will be waged between a declining United States — struggling to maintain it’s hold on the ring of fortifications it has around the World-Island — and China —which appears to finally be realizing the grand vision of using rail transport to unify the Eurasian continent under their leadership.
What I find so compelling about this vision is that it renders so much about 20th century and even contemporary history suddenly explicable. It explains Hitler’s seemingly suicidal bid to capture Eastern Europe. It explains the importance of the Cold War policy of containment.
And it even casts President Barack Obama's pivot to Asia and attempts to push through the TTIP and TTP trade agreements in a new light. Indeed, McCoy is effusive in his praise of Obama as a tactician — not something you often read, especially amid all the criticism about his inability to get the country out Afghanistan and the reliance on drone warfare.
There are pieces of it that didn’t register quite as useful for me. The long explanation of CIA torture tactics and the Pentagon’s feckless strategy of triple canopy domination is thorough, but I felt was covered in more depth and range elsewhere. It was only when McCoy pivoted back to his scenarios for the decline of American empire that the book felt like it was getting back on track.
As for those, I think they’re enough to give anybody pause. You can find a full spectrum of scenarios that will suit your specific level of anxiety. Personally, I’m hopeful though not expectant that the United States can stage some kind of climate change-induced tactical withdrawal, setting up a Westphalian global regime of regional powers controlling spheres of influence.
But as McCoy aptly criticizes our president for early in the book, there’s no reason to believe that the U.S. can continue to enjoy the benefits of a global empire without investing the resources in maintaining it. If we give up on NATO and try to foist defensive costs on allies while blithely ignoring the benefits that we derive from our global leadership — not least of which is the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency — we are going to pay for it.
But then, how do you maintain a global empire when the domestic economy that is supposed to underpin the enterprise has been gutted by global capitalism? So much to think about!
And that’s really the best thing recommending this book, in my opinion, is that it will make you think a LOT about both history, contemporary politics, and the road ahead to 2030....more
It's a book about New York, obviously. One of those.
It's a climate change book too. Not in the sense that iThis book is a lot of things all at once.
It's a book about New York, obviously. One of those.
It's a climate change book too. Not in the sense that it's explicitly about climate change, so much as the fact that climate change is almost as much the setting as New York is.
It's a sort of sci-fi, futurist book too, with a dash of apocalypse. In the year 2140, technology has not solved humanity's problems. We've survived the First Pulse and the Second Pulse -- two major climate change events that have caused the sea level to rise 50 feet. Humanity is bowed, but not broken. We didn't conquer nature, but 120+ years does give us time to develop new materials and techniques.
Kim Stanley Robinson is also a lefty, so this book spends a lot of time tackling New York's most parasitic resident: global finance. I thought his political analysis was cogent and as implausible as what he describes seems right now, it was pleasant to read. Especially as the coronavirus prompts the disaster capital machine to fuck us over as I write this. Perhaps that's why KSR cautions against happy endings.
"Every moment is a wicked struggle of political forces, so even as the intertidal emerges from the surf like Venus, capitalism will be flattening itself like the octopus it biomimics, sliding between the glass wals of law that try to keep it contained, and no one should be surprised to find it can squeeze itself to the width of its beak, the only part of it that can't squish flatter, the hard part that tears at our flesh then it is free to do so. No, the glass walls of justice will have to be placed together closer than the width of tan octopus' beak -- now there's a fortune cookie for you! And even then the octopus may think of some new ways to bite the world. A hinged beak, super suckers, who knows what these people will try."
It's a real great stew he has going here and, unlike the other work of his that I have read Red Mars, the ensemble cast of characters are also interesting and give the tale some nice fiber. It's probably not for everybody, but this book was definitely for me....more
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