Trade, ancient and modern: from China to the Sharing Economy

Two micro-reviews for you...one on The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, the other on Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

The Silk Road consists of several chapters in central-Asian history, with generous photographs of the landscape or art connected to the region. If readers are interested primarily in the Silk Road's heyday, the volume may be mildly disappointing, as the chapters on exploration, archaeology, and looting in the 'modern' age (19th century and continuing) constitute half the book. There is much of interest, however, and all of that archaeological looting is still firmly connected to central Asia's golden age. I would read it as a supplement to a more substantive history of the Silk Road trade than a history of it, however.

Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing introduces the notion of 'mesh' businesses, which sustain themselves on a great deal of interaction between customers and the business itself, typically involving 'sharing' resources.  Sometimes the business may merely be the platfom through which customers interact with one another -- AirBnB, for instance. The book is written almost as a pitch, urging people in the wake of the Great Recession to consider what kind of mesh businesses they could think of. The author argues that the market is ripe:  because of the recession, trust in traditional brands is or was at an all-time low, and people are more willing to experiment.   Many successful companies were founded amid recessions, says the author, because their founders saw a way to create something useful in the rubble.  Because mesh businesses are all about using goods more efficienctly, they can grow even in an economic crunch: indeed, that's their selling point. Why waste money buying a car when one can be borrowed at-will through Zipcar?  This more efficient use of resources is also more sustainable from an environmental point of view: to use the same example, a Zipcar's pollutants are not only spread out among many people's use, but they and services like Uber mean that cars no longer need to waste their potential sitting around in a parking lot or on the street all day,  consuming space or clogging the arteries of trade.    I found Mesh interesting, but slightly dated, not mentioning services like uber which were technically around back then,but hadn't exploded in popularity the wav they have now.  

Podcast of the Week: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Great War

This week I'm highlighting #272 of the Art of Manliness podcast, an interview with the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.  This book examines C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's role in the Great War and delves into ways that civilization catastrophe shaped the minds and the writing of these two much-loved authors.

The Art of Manliness podcast is another heavy favorite of mine, largely because its author has such an excellent, well-seasoned conception of manhood.  Brett McKay doesn't write articles on being a pickup artist or an alpha-male athlete.  His perception of masculinity is deeply inspired by the Greco-Roman concept of manly virtue; that is, character and masculinity were deeply mixed. Much of his writing concerns not only being good at being male --  learning skills, taking on challenges -- but being a good man, a good husband, a well-informed citizen who can learn, communicate, and work well with others.   He also interviews authors frequently;  professionals, scientists, physicians, soldiers, etc,    In addition to sharing scientific studies, literary criticism, etc. McKay also has sections on grooming and style.

A few samples:
Honor, Courage, Thumos, and Plato's Idea of Manliness
How to Deal with Aggressive People
The Classical Education You Never Had
Harnessing Behavioral Psychology for a Rich Life
The Manliness of Jack London
Level Up Your Life with Nerd Fitness



McKay has been the source of a few reads here, including The Thin Man last year.

A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

The Canon: A whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
© 2007 Natalie Angier
293 pages

Science is amazing! Why is so much of the writing about it so lame?   Natalie Angier's The Canon first reviews the principles of scientific thinking before talking - nay, gushing -- about the basics of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology,  astronomy, and geology.   But this isn't just a science primer like Almost Everyone's Guide to Science, or Theories for Everything. It is written with a conscious desire to seem fun, so the author is borderline bubbly and generous with cultural references and wordplay.  It's sometimes distracting, but I enjoyed it on the whole.  The personable approach to science also manifests itself in the way Angier works in little stories about her life that relate (like being thunderstruck by an earthquake in her normally placid residence in  D.C.), or interviews with scientists in the field, whose own love and continuing wonder for their subject is part of the delivery.   This is definitely a layman's approach to science -- there's no graphs, equations, or tables to be found, no terrifying mathematics -- but what made a winner for me, from the get-go, were the opening chapters on thinking scientifically. Angier sells the scientific method to readers by connecting it to what they already do: for instance,  the act of troubleshooting a technical problem is similar, as we attempt to narrow down problems by focusing on one variable at a time. A reader who reads Brian Greene with ease may find Angier's lively -- manic, even --  romp through the lab to be silly, but I found her enthusiasm welcome and the wordplay diverting.  A sample from her chapter on geology:

The planet we inhabit, the bedrock base on which we build our lives, is in a profound sense alive as well, animate form from end to end and core to skin. Earth, as I said earlier, is often called the Goldilocks planet, where conditions are just right for life and it is neither too hot nor too cold, where atoms are free to form molecules and water droplets to pool into seas. There is something about Goldilocks, beyond her exacting tastes, that makes her a noteworthy character, a fitting focus for our attentions. The girl cannot sit still. She's restless and impulsive and surprisingly rude. She wanders off into woods without saying where she's headed or when she'll be home. She barges through doors uninvited, helps herself to everybody else's food, and breaks the furniture. But don't blame her. She can't help herself. Goldilocks is so raw and brilliant that she has to let off steam. Like Goldilocks the protagonist, Goldilocks the planet is a born dynamo, and without her constant twitching, humming, and seat bouncing, her intrinsic animation, Earth would not have any oceans, or skies, or buffers against the sun's full electromagnetic fury; and we animate beings, we DNA bearers, would never have picked  ourselves up off the floor.   The transaction was not one-sided, though. The restless, heave-hoing motions of the planet helped give rise to life, and restless life, in turn, reshaped Earth." 

Looking ahead & some also-reads

I intentionally launched this year off with some fun reading, so we're off to a good start and there's more on the way.  Yesterday Amazon held a flash sale for science books, and I picked up a few relatively recent releases for the princely sum of $7.   

Read but not reviewed this month have been:

Ask a Science Teacher, a collection of  250 science columns written in response to reader-submitted questions, Many of the initial questions were solicited from schoolrooms, and the book as a whole is targeted to a younger audience -- anywhere from late elementary to early high school, I would think. I found it interesting enough, but laced with corny jokes.

India in the Global Community, P. Paramundi Karan. A brief introduction to India, which I read to grease the rails for a larger and more substantial history. This little book covered geography, politics, industry, religion, culture, diplomacy, etc. all in different chapters. The tone and bounty of photos suggest it was written for younger audiences, like middle school. For whatever reason it was cataloged with my library's adult nonfiction, though, and I stumbled upon it while shelving books.  While it covers a great deal, it's all very superficial. The chapter on political history, for instance, mentions the Aryans, then disorder; Asoka, then disorder; the Mughals, then disorder; the Brits, and then Gandhi & Nehru, followed by several wars with Pakistan.

Coming up this week: a review for another science  book read this week, a possible review for a digital enterprise book, Asian history, and more in my developing "good news for the future" theme.  So far I'm including In the City of Bikes, the Big Necessity, On Bicycles, and The Mesh as part of that series.

Also, last night I watched Bladerunner, which I thought would be a Reads to Reels post. As it happened, the movie references were all subtle, like the offworld settlements and the fake owl. The only major plot element was the lead character's quest to retire some replicants, but one of the best scenes in the book was a no-show.  I didn't mind the abstinence of Mercerism, though.  I found it an odd movie, presumably one that improves upon repeated viewings. 

The Twilight of the Presidency

The Twlight of the Presidency: An Examination of Power and Isolation in the White House
© 1970, 1987
200 pages

In Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy uses his personal experience as a Johnson aide, along with the study of other administrations of the 20th century, to comment on the apparent decline of the US Presidency as an effective force for serving the public good.   Writing in an age that had seen the ill repute of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, followed by the benign but inept administrations of Ford and Carter,  Reedy was pessimistic about the future of the presidency.  In our own age the imperial presidency has revived and waxed even stronger,  to the degree that  American families may hear or mention the president by name more than their own  relations!    Yet for all the time that has passed, Twilight of the Presidency's insight into how the presidency as an office works remains incredible.

Reedy refers to the office as an elective monarchy, and maintains it had that potential from the beginning.  Yet except for Abraham Lincoln, no president of the 19th century really used the office to its full  authority.   The essential advantage of the presidency, Reedy writes, is the will to action: the Supreme Court can only decide on such issues arrive at its doorstep, and the Congress is an enormous bureuacracy whose wheels are clogged with corruptive grime.  The president can act on his own accord, can be  -- The Decider.    He can seize the initiative and put everyone else on the defense while Congress is still attempting to get a bill from a subcommittee to the floor.     Another advantage in the president's court is the aura of his office; the American president is simultaneously the head of government and the head of state.  He enjoys much of the reverence given to a figure like Queen Elizabeth the II,  escaping direct personal abuse as someone like Tony Blair or Nick Cameron might have to endure during "Question Period".

In one chapter, Reedy dwells on more of the monarchical trappings of the office of POTUS: the fact that the chief executive is surrounded by hundreds of people every day, all of whom are fixated on him. They may be White House staff serving his needs so he can focus on the issues of the day,  or enthralled aides waiting for their chance to bask in the royal farr and be noticed.  This bureaucratic cloud has the effect of isolating the president from society at large;  their own opinions being the only ones the president hears. They're hardly representative: Reedy writes that Johnson couldn't understand the youth rebellion against him, because all of the young men in his employ were  perfectly at ease with the administration's current Vietnam policy.    More substantially, Reedy comments that because the host around the president is there to serve and administer his wishes,  he rarely receives pushback from policy suggestions.  (Reedy alleges that the only president of the 20th century who was nearly completely successful at staying connected to the people, instead of being hemmed-in by his advisors, was FDR. )  Reedy comments mournfully that there were numerous times that  the United States might have resisted further entanglement in Indo-China, but when Johnson passively expected alternatives, all he received were alternating views on what his aides thought he wanted to do -- stay the course.     Staying the course is almost always the easiest thing to do,  even when considered objectively it's unwise. Presidents are not objective,  however; they are the subject of national attention, and of history books. They are the face and will of the nation.   If a private citizen makes a mistake that costs him dearly, he is free to cut his losses and walk away with a slightly reddened face and a lighter wallet. But if a President decides engagement in Vietnam or Iraq was a mistake, he has not only wagered money but lives and honor.   To write off the lives of thousands of young men and women is not a task easy to do in a democracy.

The office's isolation and policy inertia of part of the reason why perfectly intelligent men can make  astonishing missteps in office, whether it's invading Cuba on bad intelligence, or invading Iraq on....can the WMD threat even be dignified as 'intelligence'?. Another aspect, though, is the growth of the office itself: we've come a long way from Washington and his three secretaries.    Because so much authority has been delegated to executive agencies, it is perfectly possible for people of one department to make pivotal decisions under the aegeis of presidential authority without the executive actually knowing about it.  The bureacracy is now so large that it has institutionalized itself;  it moves under its own inertia, and  a particular department's  long-running policies and officers can outlive presidents.  This is why Reedy, despite being a Democrat, thinks it is perfectly possible that Iran-Contra could have been created and implemented without Reagan actually knowing in full what was happening.

Twilight is incredibly insightful, and admirable. Although he wrote out of concern for an office  whose efficiency was fast diminishing,  his exposure of why remains true today.  At least in part, that is; I assume the presidency has become even more isolated from the American people because of security concerns.  The 2016 election results, which took D.C. utterly by surprise, may indicate how out of touch the imperial center is with the people beyond the coasts.  I wonder if such a book could be written today: Reedy had the advantage of witnessing or knowing people who remembered the presidency when it was still boring, before  Hoover and Roosevelt made the office a source of daily fixation. Could an author who has grown up with the imperial presidency analyze it in this fashion? I doubt it.

Related:

• The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy, which quoted on this and recommended it to me. 
• The Once and Future King, F.H. Buckley. Buckley contends that effective monarchy has re-established itself in the form of the American presidency and the prime ministers of the UK and Canada,  echoing some of Reedy's chapter on the making of the American monarchy. This is one I really must re-read..

The Forever War

The Forever War
© 1974 Joe Haldeman
236 pages

“I called to the waiter, 'Bring me one of those Antares things’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole damn planet.” 

Sometimes you just can't win.  In Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, Haldeman relies on his experience as an engineer in Vietnam, and his extensive scientific reading, to create a visceral account of war and alienation in the far future.   He begins in the near future, however, in the 1990s, as an Earth which has begun to aggressively explore and colonize the Milky Way via a network of 'collapsars' becomes embroiled in a war against another spacefaring power.    Earth has never fought in space before, and since the Vietnam War had actually been tending toward global pacifism. A few veterans from previous wars guide Earth's policy and martial strategy, however, and so begins a galactic quagmire that will span hundreds of years.   Yet because of the relativistic effects of near-light space travel, Private William Mandela and other troops in the first wave will become aliens to their own people,  aging only a couple of years as the decades pass on Earth.    I am not surprised in the least at Forever War's enduring reputation for SF  excellence, as Haldeman succeeds brilliantly on multiple fronts.

At the heart of Forever War's success is the curious consequences of relativistic physics.  Because time passes more slowly the closer a traveler gets to lightspeed,  what seems like weeks to Madella is years on Earth -- and the more traveling one does, the more severe the distortions are. Haldeman hints at this early on, when a sergeant who barely looks older than Mandella  takes over their training. After only a couple of years of "subjective" time -- that is, Mandella's experience of time -- he returns to Earth to find that decades have passed. His mother is elderly, and Earth is in a grim way.  Culture has changed significantly, too, and Mandella feels like a stranger in a strange land.  Despairing of finding a place on Earth, Mandella and his lover-in-arms Marygay return to the service.  Earth becomes a distant memory, but because the war lasts so long Mandella frequently experiences future shock as he encounters evidence of even more radical transformations in Earth's culture.  These changes are staggering: the world is united under the authority of the UN, a government on a war footing which attempts to control every aspect of life, with resulting economic and personal depression. "Every aspect" includes sexuality, as homosexuality is used as a method of population control and assumes such prominence that heterosexuality is regarded as tantamount to sociopathy.  Haldeman's perception of sexuality as fluid and complicated might get him stoned today, for conflicting with the present notions of hard-set "orientations".  Yet here -- as in 1984, as in Brave New World --  this government attempt to rein in the most unruly passion of humanity is resisted.    In the beginnig, Mandella and other soldiers are assigned sexual partners for the night, but tend to gravitate toward one particular partner. Mandella's only thread of hope, of sanity in a universe constantly changing around him, is his fellow relic and lover Marygay.  

The time dilation also effects the military consequences of the war:   Earth's soldiers are far better at war in general, but because so much objective time passes between launches and arrivals, the Taurans often seem to be fighting with weapons from the "future".  Those weapons bear mentioning, because the martial aspects of Forever War are the second big triumph for Haldeman. Frankly, I've never read  SF-military combat this interesting.  Key to space soldiering is the Fighting Suit, a skintight unit that protects and augments the body within; later on,  the fighting suits are an early example of technohumanism,  using an access port plugged in above the hip to interact with the body's systems.   The suits allow for greater effacy and are vital to staying alive in a hostile universe, but they're not foolproof.  Bumping against a rock of frozen gas might cause a deadly explosion, for instance, and if the suits are damaged in combat they're likely to cause total user death through overheating and such. Still later "stasis fields" are invented that prevent electro-chemical activity, so  combat within them has to be  the old-fashioned stuff:  swords and arrows.

Virtually everyone who reads this catches the parallel between Haldeman's soldiers -- who return home to find it a foreign country in every way but the name -- and returning veterans from Vietnam,  who found not a home but an insane asylum in 1960s-1970s  America.    Although modern readers aren't traveling at the speed of light, sometimes it seems the world is. We're all living in various stages of future shock, unless we're kids for whom new things are simply to be expected, and so Mandella is our man.  I found his story gripping on every level -- the science, the combat, and the societal evolution.   Although we're unlikely to start zipping around the stars anytime soon, several aspects of Haldeman's future bear thinking about: the control of society and  soldiers through chemicals, especially.

Laughter is Better than Communism

Laughter is Better than Communism: Politics, Wit, and Cartoons
180 pages
© 2014 Andrew Heaton

 A couple of years ago I stumbled upon Andrew Heaton’s “EconPop”, a series of videos in which he used popular films to illustrate economic concepts in a playful way.  Laughter is Better than Communism  employs a similar approach, collecting satirical pieces on politics and economics written from a libertarian angle. Heaton's pieces include commentary on occupational licensing and gerrymandering, which despite their role in undermining political life and economic growth, don't receive as much attention from libertarians as something like foreign policy. Even when he treads ground covered by other authors, though, Heaton's comic style makes his delivery unique nonetheless. He writes as an entertainer, not a lecturer, and liberally festoons the book with cartoons to illustrate his points. In the chapter on gerrymandering, for instance,  Heaton presents actual maps of congressional districts which have been grotesquely molded to create a certain constituency (a bloc of conservatives in a liberal city, for instance, or  the corralling of black votes into a single district), side by side with illustrations of what those distorted electoral maps might resemble: a man surprised by lightening, for instance, or a lemur throwing a boomerang.


Despite the amount of cheek and comics, though, Laughter has a lot of serious points to make. This is a partial education in political economy and economy in general:  Heaton covers the problem of Congress, for instance, of how the behavior that makes an individual congressman popular in his district (using federal money to build things in that particular state) makes Congress dysfunctional and loathed collectively, because money is constantly being taken from people, only partly reappearing in odd pet projects, and Congress itself  spends all of its time arguing and moving the money.  He hails the salutatory effects of trade between individuals and nations,  noting what he used The Dallas Buyer's Club to illustrate : commerce brings people together who would otherwise despise one another, and gives them a reason not to kill each other.  It also allows them to prosper together,  pooling their expertise and gifts.  Impediments to trade -- like occupational licensing laws which prevent private citizens from developing their own interests and helping people, or burdensome regulations that make growing a small business impossible -- are often erected through bipartisan efforts for good intentions, but often rob the many on behalf of the few, like businesses which have already established themselves and want to squelch further competition.  Heaton alternates between real examples and fictional scenarios, but if you're interested in learning more about how occupational licensing perpetuates poverty,  there's a documentary called Locked Out that may be of interest to you. Listen to a five-minute interview here with that movie's subject, a Tupelo woman named Melanie Armstrong who fought a law forcing her students to obtain an expensive license to braid hair,  read an article on the subject, or read her story directly.  This isn't just about braiding hair, but more largely how occupational licensing serves as  barrier  against self-empowerment, perpetuating poverty in the United States.  The last ten minutes are particularly encouraging, as -- after Armstrong's legal victory --  a wave of impoverished people were able to pursue their own dreams. Hope was restored.

In short, Laughter is Better than Communism fun little collection of Bronx cheers aimed at planners, prudes, and other people who feign to know better than others about how to live their own lives.


More of Heaton:

Revan Paul: And it doesn't matter if it's 'bulk metadata' or not -- who you send holograms to is information about you.

Luke: Ten thousand? We could almost buy our own ship for that!
Ben Kenobi:  The government has increased the cost of risk, and so our supplier is increasing the cost of his services. It's basic economics, Luke. We're gonna do a little lightsaber work, and then I'm going to have you read a lot of Milton Friedman.

The aforementioned economic appraisal of The Dallas Buyers Club.