I was recently challenged by some friends to some, “light reading.” “You want the truth?” my own personal demons said, “You can’t handle the truth! Or airplane fiction! Do it!” Like it does for so many characters from so many detective novels the whole incident started innocently. Then I got in too deep. Then I stopped and everything turned out great.

Private dicks! You pay them the money; they bring you the truth. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s transactional. As every opening monologue from every detective novel will tell you, every gumshoe wants it that way. A harsh past is mentioned. The client is irresistible. A hat gently turns upwards. The case is taken.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher, the first book of the Dresden Files series, introduces Harry Dresden, a regular wizard like you or me or Tim in Accounting. Harry is also a detective.

The story begins with this wizard-detective getting a phone call. Hey, says the future client, do I have your permission to show up at your place of business and request your professional services in exchanges for currency? Are you a real businessman or is this just a put on?

Since this is fiction, Harry is in fact a legitimate business wizard.

The story goes from there. A hooker and a mobster are murdered via exploding hearts. The cops are worried; our protagonist arrives at the crime scene and offers no useful information. Later, a potential client wants Harry to find her missing husband. He (the husband) wants to be a wizard. The husband has recently, suspiciously disappeared. Harry has no insight. Three hundred pages later; our highly-able wizard-detective begins to suspect that these two cases might be connected.

Storm Front suffers from many weaknesses. Most annoyingly, Harry has to prove to people that he is a wizard using only the power of his words. Wouldn’t a competent wizard have some minor spells at the ready to convince potential clients that he is a wizard and not a poorly-branded detective? The excuse offered:

“There are powers in the universe that most people don’t even know about. Powers that we still don’t fully understand. The men and women who work with these powers see things in a different light. They come to understand things in a different way. This sets them apart. Sometimes it breeds unwarranted suspicion and fear.”

As a public service, I am announcing that you do not need to fear and suspect the wizard who cannot keep his love potions separate from his break-in-case-of-demon potions. Detective novels survive on the wits of their protagonists and a clever unfolding of the plot. Why? Because in the life of the detective, everyone dies or is betrayed. I don’t mind ridiculousness. A lot of detective fiction has a gallows humor to it. In Storm Front the only character that wasn’t too self-important was the talking skull that wanted to party.

Please don’t read this book.

About two months ago, you may have felt a slight rumble as A Dance with Dragons, the sixth tome in the series, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” was released to the public. This rumble was not a natural disaster. It was the sudden vanishing of six years of nerd skepticism and rage. After much-publicized grief, the newest installment of one of the most intensely popular fantasy series had arrived and I think it is fair to say that the community simply got tired of being angry.

Which is probably for the best.

For those who don’t know, A Song of Ice and Fire series takes place in a world that’s medieval, a little magical, and very, very feudal. The series begins with the death of an advisor to the wine-powered king of the realm. The advisor’s replacement is the honorable king of the North..ish realm. Mayhem ensues and entraps the reader for hundreds of pages.

The books are structured very specifically, with each chapter is told from a point-of-view of one character. Many of the consistent narrators are heirs and members of the various dynasties. But many other chapters are told from the POV of one-off characters. Many of the characters die throughout the series creating a sense of uncertainty that never, ever goes away.

A Dance with Dragons continues the many, many, many, many, many plotlines from the last book. Big recognizable names like Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, and Jon Snow command most of the book, while the Stark clan, the Onion Knight, the Greyjoys have a much smaller narrative presence. The House Frey is there too, becoming increasingly ominous. I guess that where the saying, “Revenge is a dish best served fat,” comes from. The current war is in full recession. The seeds of the next war are clearly being planted, by old characters and new.

For those who are superfans of Martin’s prose stylings don’t worry. Lavish descriptions of food, eating, and excessive drinking abound. Until, finally, winter comes: “The snow had started to descend more heavily and the fire in the ditch was guttering out. The crowd began to break apart and stream from the yard, queen’s men, king’s men, and free folk alike, all anxious to get out of the wind and the cold. “Will my lord be feasting with us?” Mully asked Jon Snow.” Dance advances the plot and characters slowly, but well. Not knowing exactly what the next books contain, I still think it’s safe to say that this book is the eye of the storm. A Dance with Dragons will be attacked for being slow, pointless, wheel-spinning. It’s true that not much happens, but A Song of Ice and Fire has always been a game of chess. If you want to root for a particular pawn on the board, that’s fine. When it gets taken, look to the rest of the game and understand that isn’t over.

Justin Fox, an economic columnist and blogger for Time, released a book in June 2009 detailing the rise of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. His tear down of the failures of theories is an interesting read but only for his writing ability. Fox does such an efficient job of pointing out the market’s inefficiencies and irrationality that the book seems almost like a study in restating the obvious. Fox succeeds at telling the story well by using clever anecdotes. However, the book is not a must read except for who are caught up in the stock market.

CJ Sansom, a British historian turned mystery novelist released his fourth Matthew Shardlake mystery in February and it proves once again to be an engrossing and excellent historical murder story. I first discovered Shardlake and Sansom when I was wandering aimlessly through used book stores in Singapore during my 23 hour stopover there. I grabbed the third Shardlake book Sovereign which I finished by the time I my flight landed in India. When I had returned back to the US, I quickly ripped through books 1 and 2, Dissolution and Dark Fire. Sadly, I was only able to get my hands on Revelation a couple weeks ago.

Sansom’s stories revolve around the lawyer Mathew Shardlake, an experienced (but not old) lawyer in the early 16th century who continues to get caught up in murder mysteries. They usually involve heavy political and religious overtones as this is during the reign of King Henry VIII and his push away from the Catholic Church and the creation of the Church of England.

Revelation

CJ Sansom

Viking Adult (February 5, 2009)

Sansom’s book reminded me slightly of the The Left Behind series and also of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. In this version, Shardlake, our lawyer and detective who is cunning but a “crookback” encounters his good friend who has been murdered and left for display in the Lincoln’s Inn, the court where the lawyers have their offices. The murder is quickly hushed up by the King’s Coroner but Shardlake is apart of the detective team to get to the bottom of the problem. Shardlake is a former hot gospeller or reformist who was an avid Protestant. But he has slipped away. The coroner, Harsnet is a new found and devout reformist and they are working with two more famous nobles who are unimportant for this review. Initially they fear that the murders are connected to threats about Jane Seymour, she who has recently caught the King’s eye. But upon some investigation, they quartet discover that the murders are in fact a plot to live out some symbolism of The Book of Revelation.

The murderer uses the seven vials and their imagery from the Book of Revelation to kill seven different people. At the end of the book, he also sets his eyes on two rather prominent individuals to kill as well as the seven vials. His targets are all fallen reformers; individuals who sought to reform the church to the Protestant Ways, but have fallen and are no longer serious reformers. As we learn early in the book, Shardlake was himself a reformer but years ago moved away and is not as apolitical as he can be.

Sansom as always does a great job setting up the book and is imagery is fantastic. By giving Shardlake an interesting fellow detective (Harsnet) who is plodding, slow and a bit stuck on the murder being possessed by the Devil, we see a more interesting detective. Shardlake does not suffer from moments of epiphany, we get to follow his thought processes and we as readers can be annoyed as he misses different clues that we ourselves can pickup. Sansom’s writing is also quite grim and bleak. We get a full view of the racism and elitism of the age; we understand the death and the horrible misunderstandings that plagued the doctors and mental patients of the time.

Sansom’s best trait might be his realism, his ability to paint a realistic, dirty, muddy, smelly scene that is interesting, but one I’m glad I can read while sitting on a couch with smooth jazz on the radio and not walking down the muddy streets with people dumping out their chamber pots on to my head.

Four out of Five Melons!

I recently finished this tour-de-force of a book that relates the life of Alexander Hamilton starting with his obscure birth in the Caribbean to his death at the hand of the rogue Aaron Burr. This book is a fantastic read, beautifully written. Chernow takes pains to make arguments against many of Hamilton’s detractors throughout history, and he often succeeds in defending Hamilton and in bringing his brilliance into today’s world.

Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow

Penguin Press: 2004

Most of Chernow’s previous writing consists of biographies or histories of financial greats such as J.P. Morgan and John D Rockefeller Jr. In this tome (and it is a tome at 852 pages long and even more notes), he turns his face to the first great financial wizard of America, Alexander Hamilton. Throughout the book, Chernow’s writing is clear, excessively coherent, and at times very fun to read.

Before reading the biography, I knew almost nothing of Hamilton– save the fact that his death resulted from a duel, at the hand of the vice president no less! This biography alerted me to the brilliance, the sheer talent and drive that possessed Hamilton throughout his life. But also Hamilton’s amazing ability to infuriate and turn people into enemies. That attribute eventually caused his downfall.

Hamilton was born on a Caribbean Island and later immigrated to New York at the age of 17. After failing to get into Princeton, he attended Kings College (later Columbia University) and was an early adopter of the Revolution Spirit, giving speeches on the college lawn. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he became an Artillery Commander which eventually led him to meeting General George Washington. Washington soon took Hamilton as an aide-de-camp and, eventually, Hamilton acted as Washington’s chief of staff, writing numerous correspondence for the General and in some ways, acting like the son Washington never would have.

After the war, Hamilton was a key figure from New York at the Constitutional Convention and eventually wrote The Federalist Papers with John Jay and James Madison. Though at the time it was known those three wrote them, it has only become apparent that Hamilton wrote the majority of them years later. After the adoption of the Constitution and the election of Washington as President, Hamilton followed his long patron into the Treasury Department and began to make enemies as fast as possible. Hamilton saw America as a united republic, a great power waiting to be born. He believed in the industrialization and powerful merchants as the leaders of America. This brought him into powerful conflict with history’s most notorious idealist, Thomas Jefferson, and his disciples James Madison and James Monroe.

Jefferson saw America’s path as a small agrarian society. Sadly, Jefferson’s idea of America only worked with legalized slavery, an institution he claimed he detested and yet kept slaves throughout his life. During Washington’s presidency, two political groupings started to develop: the Federalists led by Hamilton, and the Republicans (Democrat-Republicans who would later become today’s Democratic Party) led by Jefferson. Both groups saw their viewpoint (a strong union backed by a powerful national government with a very strong executive branch for Hamilton, an intensely weak federal government with unbelievably powerful states rights and most power gifted to the House of Representatives for Jefferson) at what the revolution truly meant. They were unable to understand the other side’s viewpoint, and too often, they sought to distort their enemies’ arguments in atrocious ways.

Hamilton succeeded in convincing Washington (who usually did his best to stay above politics and simply choose better policies) that a strong Treasury, with the ability to tax at the federal level and restricted from the states was the best way to grow the nation. Hamilton served five years at the Treasury and quickly built its size in terms of manpower to be larger than the rest of the executive branch combined. When he left, he returned to his law office and often tried cases before the Supreme Court. He was also still very active in politics. In 1800, he worked too diligently to have his party member, John Adams voted out of the presidency and was soon persona non grata with much of the political establishment. The ascension of his arch-rival of Jefferson to the presidency and Madison (who since he had written the Federalist Papers with Hamilton had moved to oppose most of Hamilton’s positions) to Secretary of State, left Hamilton out in the cold.

Just four short years later, Hamilton would be engaged in a duel after Aaron Burr accused Hamilton of slandering him in private conversation. Hamilton, Chernow argues, threw away his first shot and Burr shot Hamilton. Hamilton died the following day, ending the life of one of America’s most interesting and complex characters. Hamilton has left us millions of words on his political thinkings, and much of it is still very important today. We still use the Federalist Papers in cases before the Supreme Court and we still use his reports on manufacturers to understand the progression of the American economy.

Throughout his life, Hamilton was often demonized by the Jefferson faction as an aspiring monarchist with connections to Great Britain with hopes of bringing back the King. Throughout his life, Hamilton was notoriously thin-skinned and took these assertions personally, which often led him to act completely irrationally in his attempts to put them to bed. There is no evidence for this, however. In fact, there is a complete lack of evidence that Hamilton was anything other than a brilliant financier and writer who was one of our greatest patriots. Because he fought poorly against Jefferson, he came down on the wrong side of history when Jefferson led his Revolution in 1800 and he tried to push America away from the Hamilton Empire and back towards an agrarian backward, nonfunctional society.

Chernow’s book does a great service to rehabilitate Hamilton and, more importantly, to portray this multi-sided character very well.

Five out of five Melons!

Thomas Friedman’s latest is a big step up from his last work. Hot, Flat, and Crowded which first came out in September is as all of Friedman’s writings, a very easy and quick read. Friedman does a great job simplifying subjects and making clear and coherent arguments. Most importantly, this book is significant because Friedman is the first to clearly make the case that our current Economic, Energy, Environment and  Foreign Policy (mainly confined to the Middle East, Russia  the oil rich parts of Africa) Crisis is actually one problem that a series of small step solutions can solve together. He ties that argument together well.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded:  Why we need a Green Revolution and how it will renew America  (Friedman is in the running for the longest title of the year)

Thomas Friedman (Personal Website)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; September 8, 2008

I’ll the be the first to explain to you that I don’t like The World is Flat, Friedman’s last book, or that I really dislike most of the columns he writes for the New York Times. My feeling is simple:  his arguments are simple and he too often argues against straw men, setting himself up for an easy and unqualified success. I’m still very upset with him endorsing the War in Iraq for what I think him trying to appear a moderate more than actual reviewing whether success was even possible or the if the invasion was necessary.

The World is Flat upsets me because while Friedman focuses on the insane growth of the IT industry in Bangalore, I can tell you the rest of India isn’t much like that. Moreover, most of Bangalore is not like Infosys or Satyam or Wipro. He’s argument throughout the book is that all of these countries are becoming competitors with the rest of the world. The sad part it is simply not true. If you take any of the average business within any state in India, whether it is a stainless steel manufacturing company, or a bank and you put them in America, they would fail epically. They don’t have the skills, they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have know how to solve problems. They compete with lesser firms. Throughout history, there have been firms or individuals that competed world wide in trade in industry. How did the gems and spices of the East Indies get to Europe but through the middlemen of Egypt and Malabar. My point that if you take the average American or European company and plunked them down in any developing country, no matter how along they are, they would out-compete and out skill the local competition.

But that has little to do with this book. This book discusses the coming environmental apocalypse (my words, not his). Due to global warming, pollution and absolute environmental degredation in the western world and through much of the developing world. Friedman main argument that as more people grow richer, they start consuming more energy. China is pumping out a new coal fired power plant every other week. India needs to be doing that as well (though they aren’t, now we’re having up to 10 hour power cuts in part of the country)

As they start to demand more energy they start to release greater amounts of Carbon Dioxide and thus increase the rate of C02 in the atmosphere so that just when we should be stopping the C02 emissions vehicle and backing down the road, we’re actually pressing the accelerator through the floor (it hit the floor after gas prices fell during the Reagan Administration). More so than just C02 emissions though, Friedman discusses the environmental destructions that industrial growth creates in developing nations, from expanded farmland eventually created dessert (the expanding Gobi Dessert in China) to the necessity in the Amazon of farmers to continue moving into the forest to find better land.

Friedman is very clear that he doesn’t fault the developing nations for wishing to grow and have access to the wealth of much of the Western. We can’t begrudge them for wishing to live like us. However, Friedman’s book seeks to lay out a path that America can layout a path so that American can lead the world in reversing this path.

Friedman’s most brilliant argument and he’s the first I’ve seen lay it out so clearly or concisely is that we’re giving trillions of dollars to people who hate us and actually investing in our own destruction rather than using that to invest in America. He wants us to rapidly change how we invest in petrol (gas), oil and generally energy in general. We need to move towards renewable energies (wind, solar, hydroelectric, and possible biofuels) and thus help ourselves reduce our pollution and reduce our dependence on the Middle East and those who would seek to destroy our lives. But more than that, we have to change how we think about energy. We need to start with reducing energy usage through simple reductions such as buying the smaller car to retrofitting houses and buildings so they waste less heat, less water, less energy.

Friedman goes through a variety of samples of ways to start changing our energy and environmental policies, all of which are relatively useful. I also was very glad to hear his non-endorsement of corn-based biofuels to solve the problem. Its a very simple problem that corn fuels take more energy to produce then they output there is actually no savings. More importantly, they do have a significant impact on food supply and rising and falling prices. I am also hesitant (as is Friedman) to endorse sugar cane biofuels. Though much more efficient (in terms of energy converted to do work), they are also extremely destructive to the environment.

The most important part of Friedman’s book is that he is lucid and clear. Something he never lacks in any of his Op-Eds. And in this wonkish book he provides plenty of the backup evidence he so severely lacks on so many of the Op-Eds. But most importantly, he doesn’t over simply the problems and the solutions. He lays out the solutions need to be market based, but they need government intrusion. In Germany, their is a 20 year guarantee for companies that install and use solar power cells so Germany is now the largest solar market in the world, never mind they don’t have that much sun shining. Friedman argues (convincingly) that we can and make America the leaders in renewable energies through some simple market based ways:  require greater amounts of energy is made from renewable energy, redefine energy demands so that we don’t have peak development but we have smart energy usage, increase car efficiency and many others. All of these solutions are doable and most importantly, they are all being discussed by the Obama Administartion.

One are that Friedman does not discuss, but that is pet project of mine is the net-metering or every household a energy plant. He discusses it only in passing as a way to provide slightly more power. But what he doesn’t discuss is that the possibility of household having the ability to have their entire roof covered in solar cells, having their back yard full of windmills and having a geothermal system setup in under their home so that they can sell their unused power back to the grid. Too many utilities don’t fully utilize this smart grid and smart energy usage. Too many cities and states don’t encourage the net-metering as fully as they should.

When people have to produce their own power they will only begin to truly reduce the amount of energy they need.

Overall, this is a good book, an easy read, and probably most importantly, it will help set out many of the pathways the Obama Administration is going to pursue in order to re-energize America. I suggest you read it.

Four out of Five Melons!

Jean Edward Smith’s extremely long and detailed portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) is fantastic reading and, perhaps more importantly, a fair review of the man. I truly enjoyed all of the almost 700 pages of text, along with the 150 pages of notes and 50 pages of bibliography and index. Seriously, if bibliography is everything, than this book has it all.

FDR

Jean Edward Smith

Random House, May 2007

I’ll first be honest by saying that before reading this book, I was not much of an FDR expert. In fact, I knew much less about the man than you can find on his wikipedia entry. So I went into this reading hoping to learn much more, and hoping to learn about how he led America through the Great Depression. I have a rather sick feeling that this economic downturn is going to be deeper and more destructive than most people realize so I wanted to study about how the previous generations pulled through their tough times. So my goal was more than just to understand FDR, but to understand the time period and the reactions to it.

First off, regarding Smith’s writing style and prose, he is fantastic. There are few biographies I have read in the past that were easier to read than this one. I seemed to breeze through the book and whenever I picked it up to read for just 10 minutes, I seemed to get lost for an hour. Smith is not simply a prop-artist laboring to prove FDR’s greatness. He is very critical of FDR, especially when FDR made major mistakes, whether it be in his court packing attempt in 1937, which in the long run hurt FDR immensely, or his internment of Japanese citizens during WWII. Smith also praises Roosevelt numerous times for being a grandiloquent speaker. I have never heard Roosevelt speak so I can’t argue that point, but I read some of the speeches he provided, and I was not struck by their brilliance as Smith wanted his readers to be.

As I mentioned above, I wanted to read this book to learn about the period and the societal changes. Sadly, Smith does not cover that aspect in depth. His focus is on FDR and FDR reacting to society, or acting so that society reacts. FDR is his driver, not structural alterations in the fabric of America. That’s not a criticism of Smith; his title is FDR, so it’s fair that the book is not about the Great Depression.

One complaint I do have about Smith’s style is that he often makes off

the cuff references to Ulysses S. Grant. Smith wrote a biography about Grant some years ago and he occasioanlly references Grant’s history. The problem is that I haven’t read the Grant biography and Smith’s references often require a reader to know more about Grant that many people do. That is annoying.

The book is a fantastic read and is extremely informative regarding FDR. If you want to know the man better, you could do much worse than to read this. Sadly, this is the first FDR biography I’ve ever read, so I can’t compare it to the numerous that exist already in the canon, but this one is worth reading.

I did start this book to analyze the Great Depression and see if there were solutions presented in that time period that we can re-analyze and use today. Interestingly, there are few. We can learn from the poor monetary policy that FDR used in 1937 when he tried to balance the budget, thus stalling out the recovery. We also can learn that it is important to work with the other party and not to be so obstinate as to destroy your own chances. Because after FDR failed at packing the court, the Democratic Party lost significant numbers in the next election, but more importantly, he lost the faith of many of those within his party and he had a much tougher job pushing his social change through Congress.

Interestingly, as I got more into the book, I started to realize that FDR was more similar to another President other than Obama. FDR had so many similarities to President George W. Bush. Both were from extremely well to-do families, with notably overbearing mothers. Both reached the presidency from Governorships of very important political states (New York for FDR, Texas for GWB). The differences continue into their way of thinking. FDR often resolutely believed he was right and that his opponents would eventually come to his way of thinking or they were so wrong they weren’t worth the effort to deal with.

We are still trying to understand GWB’s thinking throughout the debacle that is the Iraq War. His refusal to acknowledge what wasn’t working for three years is absolutely astounding. What I found particularly interesting was the attempts by both administrations to set up their paths to bypass government bureaucracy that they felt was entrenched against them.

During WWII, FDR by-passed those within the State Department because he felt he could not trust the high level diplomants who were set against him politically and who were in fact very racist so they severely impeded his objectives in the Pacific. Smith discusses an incident leading up to the Pearl Harbor bombing where Roosevelt and the State Department were working on a draft of an agreement so that the US would continue to sell oil to Japan (ahh the days when the US could sell oil) so that Japan would cease their rollup of the South Pacific (in the pursuit of more oil). However, FDR had by-passed so much of the State Department during his dealings with Europe that he could not control it. Moreover, he did not know how it worked. In this small instance he left it to the State Department to finalize the agreement failed, as they failed to pass on the agreement that eventually led to the Pearl Harbor bombing.

We can compare this to the Bush Administration simply bypassing much of the CIA to use the Department of Defense intelligence gathering because they favored the DoD intelligence because it showed them what they wanted. Because the Bush Administration had so often cut the CIA out of the loop and refused their intelligence that didn’t show what they wanted, they had trouble working with the CIA and getting them to do their jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan years later. FDR worked around the State Department, and perhaps that worked better for him has he worked directly with Winston Churchill and other leaders in Europe. But it also hurt him when he needed their assistance because he never worked with them to bring them to his point of view; they never fell in line with his mission.

One of the most interesting things that is so very different today than it was years ago is the resistance to push into people’s personal lives and the willingness of the press to simply cover up inconvenient facts. For example, there are numerous instances of people in 1944 who were astonished at the poor health of the president. Yet the press at the time simply passed along the doctor’s word that he was extremely healthy, disbelieving their own eyes. He would die just a few months later.

I heartily endorse this book for anyone who is looking for some FDR history. Five out of Five Stars!

Kevin Phillips’ latest book, written in order to influence the 2008 elections, aspires to much, but succeeds at little. The story of the growth of debt in America, its impact upon the society, and America’s place in the world is interesting (and Phillips has much right in his book) but he over extends himself. As a result, his overall argument comes out lacking.

Kevin Phillips

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

Viking Adult, April 2008

Phillips is a former Republican Strategist who became quite estranged to the Bush family, having published three books about the Connecticut natives and their interesting ties to interesting people throughout the world. This book is much in the mold of the others, a diatribe against the ridiculousness of Republican spending. Though he doesn’t pull many punches from Clinton’s inept handling of the housing boom and his helping to create a badly subsidized housing market.

The basis of Phillips tale is simple: since about 1980, individuals in the US have dramatically increased their debt and decreased their savings rate. Over the same time period, wages for median income worker and family stagnated, while the rich and super rich increasingly consolidated their gains. The argument is that while the US was getting richer overall, only a small percent, about 10% of the population, was in fact seeing those gains.

However, during this time period the consumers did not decrease their rate of consumption growth, so they had no choice but to start saving less and increasing their debt. The expansion of 30-year home loans, rare before the 1950s and seven- or eight-year car loans, the growth during the 1990s of the 2^nd mortgage, and perhaps most importantly, the credit card boom created easy to access debt instruments for US consumers.

This expansion of debt eventually led to sky-rocketing asset prices, first the stock market bubble in 2001 and then the ridiculous housing run-up from 2001-2006. People eventually believed that 10% year-over-year was guaranteed and bought houses at ridiculous rates or took loans out that few had hope of repaying.

Phillips does an excellent job laying out this structure and the antecedents that led to the growth in debt. His examination of the Reagan debt policies is particularly skewering in how the expansion of US Debt coincides with massive expansion of individual debt.

As Phillips expands these ideas, he decides to take his argument off in a different realm. He starts to compare the rapid growth of US debt to the expansion that happened during the 1920’s and eventually helped lead to and extend the Great Depression. The worst part of both Phillips initial argument, and his comparison the Great Depression is that he does only the most preliminary research. This is a short book, and Phillips wrote it in a short period of time, hoping to put out a pop-economics book in order to impact the 2008 US Election (the book first appeared in April 2008).

Phillips weakness is that he doesn’t tie all of his arguments solidly together. He makes an interesting case relating to Reagan and the birth of debt-America, but it’s not sound proof. A reader can not accept the entire argument on its face. I heartily believe that Reagan is highly overrated by most conservatives for his Presidential accomplishments, but that doesn’t mean that today’s economic collapse can be traced to his expansion of Star Wars.

Phillips’ arguments bottom out when he decides to try to apply the expansion of US Government and Consumer Debt since the 1970s to the expansion of Debt incurred by the previous hegemony: Spain, United Provinces (Holland/Netherlands) and England (UK). First off, including Spain along with the United Provinces and England is kind of ridiculous in the Hegemonic Transition World as many people don’t believe they ever projected their power over the entire world the way that UP and the UK did, and more importantly, like the US does today.

Spain simply stole money from the New World, they weren’t traders that truly dominated the entire world like the other nations. With his Spain argument, and also that of UK and UP, Phillips pushes those nations towards some sort of purity, both of race and religion during then end of their reigns. Sadly, this argument goes nowhere as the reactionary forces in every great power ebb and flow throughout the reign. As the power of the anti-reactionary forces wanes in every aspect, the power of the reactionary forces come to more power. That doesn’t mean that they won, it means that the normalizing forces lost their power economically so that the cultural warriors can rise up.

The worldly Brits who kept the Puritans at bay lost the ability to keep them hidden in the fields. The Internationals of Spain, who had been to America, lost the wealth and the Inquisition destroyed the country. But the Inquisition rose not because of its own strength, but because of the inability of the rest of society to put it down. But most important in this entire argument is the fact that the intolerant sector of society, the sector that rejects internationalism is not and will not be in power for a number of years. The crazy left wing Democrats who want to dismantle the US military cannot win. The Libertarians who want to return to the gold standard are laughed at by 95% of the country.

Even if one disagrees with mainstream Democrats or Republicans, they are still internationalist, and they still express a desire for America to remain the dominant political player. There is no walking away by either party. Phillips’ attempt to portray America as too weak to meet its commitments is simply years ahead of its time.

In the end, I say this book should have been written sometime in 2010, and Phillips should have stuck to his original argument: the expansion of debt led to the downfall of the US-and thus the world-economy. It should be a text book, for some high level undergraduate courses at good economics programs. There is an argument in there, but Phillips’ ramblings about the rest of the examples that predated the US downfall simply are poorly done and there exist many better out there.

Two out of Five Melons!

Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book in anthology of pop-psychology/economics/sociology is as fun of a read as his previous two, Blink and Tipping Point. However, in this version, Gladwell analyzes why people succeed, not why societies change (Tipping Point) or why people make accurate decisions (Blink).

Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers:  The Story of Success

Little, Brown and Company, November 18, 2008

Gladwell’s third offering is as easy to breeze through as his first two:  I read this one in less than 24 hours. His basic argument is simple:  that success, especially success in the business world is not a only a product of individuals working harder than everyone else, but also of specific circumstances that impact the skills individuals develop.

Gladwell’s first example is hockey players’ birthdays. In Canada (where Gladwell was raised), hockey leagues are usually grouped by age groups, with the cutoff day January 1. That means that players born on January 5, 1995 will play against kids born on December 5, 1995. Those January kids are obviously bigger and perhaps have slightly more skill, thus those kids are picked for the all-star teams and get more coaching, better coaching, and significantly more practice. As this practice is repeated from the early years (age 7 in some leagues) until Junior Hockey (Age 16) those born earlier become significantly better than their peers and thus have a better advantage of raising to the highest level, the NHL. This is played out as the vast majority of those at the highest level of Junior Hockey are born in the first three months of the years, and it is also true for Canadians in the NHL. The outlier is that these hyper-skilled athletes, who we want to believe worked so hard that they trained themselves to become good, were just born with an advantage unlike some of their peers.

I can whole-heartedly relate to the birthday as being significant. I was a pretty good baseball player back in the day, but I was born in January, not in August. Since the cutoff day for most of the traveling leagues was August 1st, those people born after August 1 had an advantage of about 6 months over me in growth. On one of the teams I played on, our coach specifically worked with his wife to have their children born after August 1st, in fact, their goal was to have them born on September 1st, that way if there were any complications, and the child popped out too soon, he would still get his full baseball eligibility. Both of the coaches kids were fantastic ball players (they would have to be if their Dad cared that much about their baseball, right?), but that father had done more than just give them advantages of advance coaching and excessive practice, he had done everything in his power to put them ahead of the rest of the game. More on parental prescribed advantages later.

Gladwell then turns his eyes to the computer world, and more specifically, to Bill Joy, one of the founders of a huge computer company, Oracle. Joy wrote much of the software and infrastructure that the Internet is based upon. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1971, unsure of his major and where he wanted to end up. He stumbled upon the Michigan’s computer lab and was hooked. Now, Joy was brilliant and he worked an absolutely ridiculous amount of time in that lab in order to become an amazing programmer. However, Joy was extremely lucky, first because the University of Michigan was one of handful of schools to install that new type of computer that was able to have multiple people use it at once. More importantly, they found a bug in the system that allowed them to abuse the system and dominate the amount of hours spent on the system. So while Joy worked his tail off, and everyone would agree that he was excessively talented, it took more than just that to succeed; he had to be lucky. He had to enroll at Michigan just at the right time (when they let freshman dominate the computer time), stumble into the lab, and find that bug. And then he had to work his tail off.

Gladwell also advocates a simple but powerful icon:  10,000 hours of practice. To become eminently successful at something, one must practice for 10,000 hours. I find this number to be quite provocative. He points out that numerous fantastically successful people practiced an inordinate amount to succeed, from concert pianists to athletes to computer programmers.

Gladwell’s most interesting example, at least to me, is when he cites a study that was conducted between two groups: a set of affluent families and non-affluent families and particularly how they raise their children. In the affluent family, the child is constantly busy with outside stimulation, whether it be trips to museums or reading books, or simply question and answer periods with parents. On the other hand, poorer families often don’t have that same dedication to encouragement and stimulation. Poor kids don’t get rides to soccer practice and to band practice, but play in the yard or watch TV. They don’t have books piled on the shelves at home, but make their own fun. Time to oneself isn’t necessarily bad, but what it does is destroy expectations that young people have to create their own path. For example, the more well off students are encouraged to challenge the rule of their superiors and to question more than poorer students, thus they are even stimulating themselves at a younger age. This comes through further and further as they age because they now have that talent to think and to think proactively becomes an inborn trait.

This study proves something that as the child of two teachers, I completely understand:  teachers have only the third most impact on a student. The first is the student, the second is the parents. Parents are significantly more important to the ability of student to learn and to engage in their surroundings. If for that reason only, this book is worth the purchase, to get parents to engage their children. To get teachers to work with parents to further engage their children.

Gladwell has come under some criticism for his books. He does scientific studies and pop-osizes them, making them digestible for the general public. He also, as he does extensively in this book, creates a straw man argument. I can’t think of one person who believes that Bill Joy wasn’t a product of his environment, or that Bill Gates still would have created Microsoft without access to a state-of-the-art computer in junior high. Would Wayne Gretsky have become the Great One without an ice patch in his backyard, or if he had been born in Los Angeles? His straw man is that society believes entirely in self-reliance and people pull themselves up. I don’t know anyone who believes that.

As for being an interesting book–it is fascinating, and Gladwell is a great story teller, as always. He makes you think, which is important in any book. And because you can always use a book like this to explain a point at a cocktail party (or if you’re more like me, at the bar over a game of darts), I heartily recommend it.

Four out of Five Melons!

E Ray Canterbery’s history of Economics is more a history of the ideas and the characters who came up with them and truly a tracing of economics. But it is a good read. Canterbery has fun telling the stories and anecdotes of the differing characters that created our economic understanding.

A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science

E Ray Canterbery

World Scientific Publishing Company, July 15, 2001

Canterbery starts out with what everyone considers the father of economic thought, Adam Smith, and then progresses through the history of thought in Europe, finally arriving at the next great thinker, John Maynard Keynes. Then the Americans take charge with Milton Friedman, JK Galbraith, and the return of neo-classical economists in the form of President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Canterbery’s book is easy to read and fast paced, and most of the economic ideas are very well explained, up to the point where the in-depth discussion of Keynes and his impact on how we thought about economics occurs. At that point, the ideas start to get complex and the explanations and differences between competing groups becomes rather pedantic and minuscule such that a non-studious follower of economics could get lost in the mumbo-jumbo.

Also, when Canterbery finally gets to his discussion of the revival of the neo-classical school, his biases start to become overly prevalent. Canterbery is not a fan at all of the monetarist arguments of the Chicago School led by Milton Friedman, or of the Supply Side Economics that Reagan pushed through in the 1980s. His argument is that it created the greatest unequal wealth distribution in the history of man, and it wasn’t needed to grow the US economy. Basically, the workers got shafted, and the rich got insanely rich.

But his most interesting argument has significant impact on the world today. He argues that the deregulation and growth of the Wall Street Economy of the 1980s created a Casino Capitalism, in which America moved away from industrial production and to making money off of financial instruments. People ceased to create physical items cars, bikes, shoes, anything and simply became service managers. This Casino Capitalism thus created an artificial wealth and should have long term impact on the economy.

The book was published in 2001, and it apparently just took 7 years for him to get it right. Canterbery also argues that the rich financiers needed the growth of free trade, and thus pushed it to create a downward trend in product pricing, further driving down wages. And he cites the best argument that wages of those making below $200,000 have grown only slightly above inflation since 1980, while those making above $200,000 have grown at 1000s of percentages. They have reaped the benefits at a disproportionate rate to the rest of the country.

However, my biggest complaint with Canterbery is not his outstanding biases (I can live with those), but it is his ability to completely ignore any economists not from Great Britain or America (except JB Say from France) in his entire treaty. He also completely ignores the economic developments and theory that might have been happening around the world. His discussion of Marx is there, but he focuses little on the differences between USSR, China, and Yugoslavia and India, all socialist countries with wide variation. He talks not at all about the failed development in Latin America, or the growth of the Asian Tigers. His analysis of the state directed capitalism of Japan is extremely lacking. it is simply a too brief of a focus.

In conclusion, Canterbery’s book is a great read to understand the economics theories and the progress of economics to this point. He of course leaves out the Bush Administrations’ additions to the Casino Economy (which I imagine he would argue there are many). Take his theory analysis, and take his hatred of the Reagonomics with a grain of salt, and you’ll learn a lot. I do recommend a somewhat brief background in Economics, especially for the post-Keynesian readings, as they get complex.

Three out of Five Melons!