Category Archives: Reviews

Character, the money shot, and the epiphany from John Romero’s memoir *Doom Guy*

March 11, 2024 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Let’s start with the Doom Guy money shot, which occurs about two-thirds through the book:

As a child, when things got bad, out of necessity, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. When Carmack sent out his report card, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. When people were upset at things happening within Ion Storm, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. Everything that happened at Ion Storm is a direct result of that flaw in my character. Had I taken action, had I talked to people, had I prevented issues from developing when they were just emerging, so many things in my career and in my life would have been different and so many people would have been spared the difficulties this flaw created.

That’s a, and perhaps the, key takeaway from Doom Guy: inaction is itself a form of action and character is closer to destiny than many of us would like to admit. Our flaws are often as invisible as water is to fish, and it often takes catastrophe to reveal them in undeniable ways. Most of us are masters at ignoring or excusing our flaws, and I don’t excuse myself from that generalization, and I admire Romero for his willingness to state what he did wrong, so that the rest of us can learn from him.[1] Id software and then Ion Storm may have stayed small in part because of the flaws of their leaders. No one is without flaws, but the more I live and the more I see of the world, the more I think that the most effective people are also often the ones with the greatest capacity to see their own flaws and either ignore them (by focusing on strengths) or mitigate them.

He got to the high points, though, by being an incredible programmer—and he attributes success to his ability to memorize and synthesize information. Romero says he is hyper​thymesic, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the uncommon ability that allows a person to spontaneously recall with great accuracy and detail a vast number of personal events or experiences and their associated dates: highly superior autobiographical memory.” Romero’s not sure of the extent to which he was born with it and the extent to which he created it via practice: “There is an argument to be made that I sharpened my memory, that I created my condition due to my obsession with programming and games.” People who try to cultivate an ability will see that ability improve, and then perhaps attribute that ability to something inborn. Derek Sivers has written about using spaced-repetition software to memorize programming facts and ideas (“I wanted to deeply memorize the commands and techniques of the language, and not forget them, so that they stay at the forefront of my mind whenever I need them”).

For Romero, “Having the ability to absorb massive amounts of detail and retain that information was a great advantage,” and he “was obsessed with retaining everything I learned.” Maybe more people should be obsessed with retaining everything they learned: it’s not possible to learn higher-order concepts without a bedrock of primitives. Yet many people believe this, seemingly, including younger me.[2]

I’m not as accomplished as Romero or Sivers, but I do get asked how I connect so many disparate ideas and sources in my writing. One answer is “reading a lot.” Another answer is that I put many notes, quotes, and ideas into Devonthink Pro, using the strategies I describe here, and use that when I write. For example, when I plug the first quote in this essay into Devonthink Pro, I don’t find anything incredibly useful, but I do find: “Perhaps, in a period when we are communicating more than ever, the difficulties of communication are growing more obvious,” which is from 2014, and also “[George Gershwin] was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. ‘Like the pugilist,’ Gershwin said, ‘the songwriter must always keep training.'” Neither is germane to this essay, but both are interesting and, in re-reading them, I’m more likely to cite them in the next few weeks. I also have a text file with top-level ideas from books I’ve read, and a file with key takeaways from podcasts I’ve listened to. I periodically read through those files, although without the aid of Anki or similar spaced-repetition software. What I do is enough to make some readers amazed at my apparent memory. I’m not sure I have an especially good memory, but I do diligently use memory-aid systems to augment my memory and that creates the effect of me having a wizardly command of unexpected connections. I hate to reveal my secrets, but in doing so I’m hoping to help others in the same way others have helped me.

Romero also came of age in a different epistemic environment than the one that exists now. In the ’80s, Romero “realized information on programming was hard to come by, so I forced myself to retain technical information and memorize the internal details of computers—memory maps, ROM locations, hardware switches, and tons more stuff. I did it quickly, which, in turn, expanded my ability to retain and access precise memories of almost everything else.” Today, memorizing details still matters, because memory is so much faster than looking information up—even via systems like ChatGPT. The more one knows, the less one has to pause to look things up, which reduces latency and increases clockspeed.

Facebook, according to Steven Levy’s eponymous book, is similar:

What characterized Facebook’s method was the speed with which new code got pushed out. For instance, when Agarwal was at Oracle, he worked for months before he was allowed to make his first “commit” to the code base, and even then, his work went through four reviewers to make quadruple sure that the changes wouldn’t affect anything. Even then, the actual change didn’t appear to customers for years, because products were on a two-year release cycle.

At Facebook, they pushed out code four or five times a day.

There’s an analogy to what I do in that I’ve been asked how I write so fast. I’m again not sure that I write fast, but I write a lot, and when I start, I aim to remove the typical Internet distractions and keep racing ahead until I’m done. “Finish it” is one the most important things anyone trying to achieve anything can do, and many wannabe writers err in waiting for inspiration or the right level of energy or something else outside the individual’s control. Professional writers know that inspiration is nice but rare, and the key is finishing something, getting feedback on it, and iterating. People who can’t finish things are especially deleterious to any kind of team effort. In 1986, Bill Gates gave an interview[3] that bears both on this problem and on Doom Guy:

Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody really knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better. So the idea of spending a lot of time on structuring groups has always been very important.

The best ideas are the obvious ones: Keep the group small, make sure everybody in the group is super smart, give them great tools, and have a common terminology so everybody can communicate very effectively. And outside the small groups, have some very experienced senior people around who can give advice on problems. There is an amazing commonality in the types of difficulties you run into. In design reviews, I really enjoy being able to provide advice, based on programs that I have done.

“Pouring people in” often doesn’t work because those people need time to get to the frontier of the project, and, worse, if they’re the wrong people, they’ll not finish things fast enough. There are a lot of markets in which the maniacal obsessives win big, and video games appear to be one of those, particularly in the ’80s and early ’90s, when individuals or tiny groups could still massively succeed. Microsoft wasn’t a game company but it massively succeeded, maybe in part because of practices like this:

In the first four years of the company, there was no Microsoft program that I wasn’t involved in actually writing and designing. In all those initial products, whether it was BASIC, FORTRAN, BASIC 6800, or BASIC 6502, not a line of code went out that I didn’t look over. But now we have about 160 programmers, so I mostly do reviews of products and algorithms.

Gates was early and so was Romero. Romero says that “In 1983, the average adult had no real idea about computers. I was so far ahead of the curve that I wasn’t just a novelty, I was an in-demand rarity.” Scarce skills command premiums. Common skills don’t. He recognized an important trend early and was rewarded for it (“the remaining id founders were fortunate to be millionaires”).

Developing and deploying those skills has a cost, in terms of time and attention.[4] Romero wasn’t only obsessed with memorization:

Once again, we were on a 10-to-2 death schedule. In hindsight, I know this schedule sounds nuts, and the fact that we did this to ourselves may seem even nuttier, but at the time this didn’t at all feel like work. We were chasing greatness, and we ran as fast as we could. We knew someone would get to the finish line, and we wanted to get there first.

I doubt most people can or would do this—”10-to-2” refers to “ten a.m. to two a.m.” That seems challenging, but the team consisted of guys in their 20s, and so their clock speed could be incredible (“The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns”).

Doom Guy is a very Silicon Valley story, but without much of it occurring in Silicon Valley. Back in the ’80s, small software teams could cohere almost anywhere; they still can, obviously, and yet the biggest tech companies are clustered in Northern California. Decades of poor government policy in California haven’t dislodged them, maybe because California bans non-competes, and most municipalities don’t (yet). The non-compete is a drag on progress and innovation and it ought to be banned globally, although starting with a national ban in the U.S. would be good.  

Should you read Doom Guy? I’m not sure, particularly if you’re outside the software industry. There’s a reason why people like Phil Knight or Andre Agassi hire J. R. Moehringer. Writing a compelling, fast-moving book is hard—notice how, for example, the quoted passage from Levy’s book uses “even then” in two consecutive sentences. Doom Guy is useful for specialists interested in building tech companies, software development in the ’80s and ’90s, and people who played id software games as a kid and want to learn more about where those games came from.

Romero had a painful childhood and dysfunctional parents, but I don’t see a causal link between that and his later success. Some people come from dysfunction and succeed; some people come from warm, loving homes and succeed; and the inverse of both is also true. I note that, as a child Romero “learned to escape into my imagination as a protective device.” I did something similar, except with books and stories rather than video games; emotional privation may have facilitated an imaginative capacity that let me conceive of a world better than the one I was living in, though at the time I didn’t understand why I thought what I thought (what kid does? few adults do).

Doom Guy‘s end is sad: decades later, Romero is designing Doom levels again. A person ideally takes on new challenges and develop new ideas over the course of his life, but Romero is retreating to retread ancient history. The contrast with his former partner John Carmack is instructive: Carmack worked on video games, and then on a rocket company (Armadillo Aerospace), and then on Facebook’s Oculus, and now an AI company called Keen Technologies. Each major period builds on and extends the one before. He kept growing. Will you?

[1] I try something similar in posts like this one.

[2] More teachers, especially in high school STEM courses where the question “Why do we need to know this?” is rarely answered, should emphasize the utility of rote memorization. Too many students, who are encouraged to “find what they’re interested in,” are—not shockingly—not interested in memorizing a bunch of data points. Until more Richard-Feynman-like professors teach intro courses, it’d be helpful to demonstrate what a student can eventually do with the basics as motivation to slog through the early process of learning a new scientific language.

[3] Hat tip (h/t) Byrne Hobart at The Diff. Byrne writes a lot more than I do: his clock speed is impressive. Whenever someone thinks I’m fast, I think of the good writers faster than me. I feel dragged down by the fatigue that’s dogged me since I got radiation treatment in Dec. – Jan. 2023-3. It got much worse after the May 25 surgery that took my tongue. And then chemo. And now petosemtamab, a clinical trial drug that is keeping me alive, but that may also be keeping me tired.

[4] Based on Doom Guy, it would be interesting to read Romero’s kids’ impressions of their childhood and their relationships to Romero.

Freddie deBoer on writing, in “If You Absolutely Must”

January 16, 2022 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: 1 Comment

Freddie deBoer has a book, or more realistically booklet (it’s free, too), called If You Absolutely Must, and, while it’s about writing, it’s also about the world; like many interesting books, the nominal topic is a jumping off point for, if not everything, then for many things, and he takes his own advice by being eccentric and obsessed. He recommends writers be serious and notes that “Immense damage has been done to the public perception of many causes beloved by the social justice set by that set’s dogged insistence on associating those causes with totally frivolous ideas. When a writer says ‘I’m going to connect the trauma of segregation to the semiotics of breakfast cereal,’ it doesn’t make people expand their thinking on the scope of racism. It makes the writer ridiculous and the issue seem trivial.” Probably you weren’t expecting probing commentary on the “social justice” set in a book about writing, or at least I wasn’t, and yet there it is—an effective, accurate critique. DeBoer says: “If you want to stand out, try being serious.” That’s a specific form of the advice, “Don’t automatically do what everyone else is doing.” If many persons writing spend “life in a self-defensive crouch,” do the opposite: doing what everyone else does is common. What’s rare and what’s common? Figure out the latter and use it to try and do the former.

DeBoer’s advice is: “you have to be difficult. You have to be weird. I think being unclassifiable and difficult and fractious are desirable qualities for a writer in and of themselves.” He’s probably right, for the kind of writing he’s doing, and the kind of writer he’s talking to. But, don’t try to be that type of writer, or, likely, any type of “writer” in the sense of someone who makes his or her primary income from writing for the general public: it’s too glamorous, and the supply and demand are way out of balance. If You Absolutely Must is an appropriate title, because you shouldn’t try to primarily be a writer, any more than today it makes sense trying to make adult amounts of money as a photographer. Both occupations coalesced in the before-times, and the border of those before-times is hard to define precisely but occurs somewhere in the 2009 – 2015 period. I’m going to call it “2014” somewhat arbitrarily, when the smartphone and social media world is not merely born but has matured into the dominant want people access, produce, and think through information. The journalism-publishing world that existed throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st was in decline throughout the ’00s but went terminal after the Great Recession, as did the literary world. Twitter and similar replaced it; that may be good, bad, neutral, or orthogonal, but it seems true, and is linked to the way “the financial picture in this world [of writing for publications] is significantly worse than it was even 10 years ago.”

The number of words available to a person, particularly on a daily basis, used to be limited, and you had to have a printing press to get words from the writer to the reader. I’ve read numerous writers describe how hard they worked, in their youth, to access books; William Gibson stands out in this respect, but there are many others. Now, the number of words, images, moving images, and combinations of those things is, from the ability of an individual to process that media, infinite. Attention, instead, is finite: that’s the bottleneck, and we’re slowly seeing adaptation to that reality. Companies and famous persons are learning that the legacy media might best be ignored, rather than engaged with; instead, “The whole concept of giving free content, quotes, interviews to legacy media corporations is obsolete,” and the job of companies and famous persons is to build their own channel. Whatever you’re talking about, that’s what you’re bringing attention to, and most of us are still poor at directing our own attention to things that matter, rather than things that don’t.

Point is, almost all writing institutions, the assumptions underlying those institutions, and so on, were set up before the smartphone-social-media era. Most of the people teaching writing were born and came up in the previous era, and even those who weren’t, still likely haven’t entirely imbibed the new world, and I include myself at least partially, and maybe entirely, in this. We went from a world of relative scarcity to a world of information abundance, and we’re still dealing with those effects. I’ve run into a couple of people paying apparently good money for masters degrees in journalism, which is a level of financial insanity and time wasting that I can just barely comprehend. Those masters degrees shouldn’t exist, and whoever’s in them hasn’t gotten the message.

If you’re trying to make adult amounts of money primarily as a writer today, you’re competing with people who have family money quietly backing them, and with people who have achieved financial independence in the tech industry. This is one of the most interesting bodies of work published in the last 20 years. You are also facing up against people like deBoer, who “write pathologically; that is, I write so much that it has become a detriment to my life, and the amount of writing I’m doing is frequently inversely correlated with my overall health. I have tracked how much I write in a given week fairly obsessively for about 9 years now. Since I lost my job last June I have been averaging a bit more than 35,000 words a week.” “Pathologically” is an apt word here: “involving, caused by, or of the nature of a physical or mental disease,” although I don’t love the word “disease” and prefer the ancient Greek notion of obsession arising almost from outside the self, or from divine inspiration: closer to Julian Jaynes, further from modern medicalization. Whatever the mental model one likes—I’ll take muses inserting metaphoric Neuralink into the brain and piping in messages—being obsessed is here, if not a virtue, then a condition of many of those who pursue this mode of writing, often at the expense of much else in their lives.

Still, DeBoer says that “If you’re a consumer of writing, you’re facing a paucity of real choice, and the choices that are before you are all likely quite unappealing. People seek out writers on the margins because they’re tired of pieces telling them that Valentine’s heart candies are rape culture.” I’m not sure all consumers of writing face a paucity of real choice: I’ve been in libraries, I’ve read books not published in the last four years; right now I’m a quarter through Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. There are around 230 websites in my RSS feed, none of which routinely tell me that “Valentine’s heart candies are rape culture.” So, finding that kind of writing is a choice, more than it’s forced and foisted on a reader. For many years I subscribed to or read the New York Times‘s Sunday edition, in paper, but I quit a while ago, and in doing so, I exercised the “real choice” to not support the sort of thing deBoer is talking about here. That some number of readers are making that choice to read about the Valentine’s heart candies thing, even if they somehow feel they aren’t making a choice, might be another avenue of exploration. From what I understand, there are also sources out deifying a certain man who inherited his father’s fortune and who is a former reality TV show host; I don’t read those either.

Writing fiction isn’t deBoer’s main interest here, but it’s been one of my interests: writing fiction, never an easy route to paying the bills, doesn’t work any more. As a hobby, sure. I’ve been annoying friends and acquittances by asking, “How many books did you read in the last year?” Usually this is greeted with some suspicion or surprise. Why am I being ambushed? Then there are qualifications: “I’ve been really busy,” “It’s hard to find time to read,” “I used to read a lot.” I say I’m not judging them—this is true, I will emphasize—and am looking for an integer answer. Most often it’s something like one or two, followed by declamations of plans to Read More In the Future. A good and noble sentiment, like starting that diet. Then I ask, “How many of the people you know read more than a book or two a year?” Usually there’s some thinking, and rattling off of one or two names, followed by silence, as the person thinks through the people they know. “So, out of the few hundred people you might know well enough to know, Jack and Mary are the two people you know who read somewhat regularly?” They nod. “And that is why the publishing industry works poorly,” I say. In the before-times, anyone interested in a world greater than what’s available around them and on network TV had to read, most often books, which isn’t true any more and, barring some kind of catastrophe, probably won’t be true again.

This isn’t a lament or whining about the kids these days, a genre that’s been tired for centuries if not millennia: it’s an observation of how culture and behavior change. Calculus is the study of change, and most writers are on some level also describing change. The economic institutions that used to support writers aren’t there any more, or exist only in skeletal form (good luck getting that MFA teaching gig). There are new ones (Patreon, self-publishing, Substack), and deBoer is orienting readers towards new ones. If they must. Don’t must. Do something else. Learn to write, as a secondary skill.

DeBoer isn’t writing to complain: he says: “the average level of pure prose chops – the ability to express yourself with clarity, concision, and style – is very high today, and better than it ever has been in the 20 years that I’ve been reading nonfiction.” I’m not sure if he’s right. It’s possible that the average level of pure prose chops among writers is higher, while the level among the general population might be lower. I can’t tell. Among students, I don’t detect a lot of change, although I also don’t know how I’d measure that, amid so many other changes. I find my own reading habits drifting away from books and towards longer articles: a Kindle combined with Instapaper are the key technologies here (it may also be that there are diminishing marginal returns to reading more fiction, at some point). It used to be that a lot of general nonfiction books had 10,000 or 20,000 words of material expanded to 50,000, in order to fill a book-sized pagecount. Now it seems that many articles remain articles. I read deBoer’s book The Cult of Smart, about which he says:

My first book, The Cult of Smart, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2020. It sold more than 98% of the books published that year! But [it] still has only sold about 6,000 copies to date (late January 2022). That’s both [sic] not very good from the standpoint of my trying to sell another book.

According to The New York Times, 98% of books published in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies.

The Cult of Smart is good and interesting, and it lines up with my own teaching experiences, far better than I wish it to. You should read it. It’s a success—well above what most writers achieve—and he makes only $75,000 from it? That’s success? And DeBoer has spent a huge amount of time writing, relentlessly, on the Internet. More and more, I find myself thinking, “I’m too bourgeois for this.”

Golden Hill — Francis Spufford

July 12, 2021 By in Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Golden Hill might be the most amazing novel I’ve read since Lonesome Dove: after a string of duds I’m pleased to find a novel so cleverly written and plotted. The latter point matters: every time Golden Hill seems to be too pleased with its own reproduction of eighteenth-century language, a shocking turn reminds one of the stakes, and that the novel is not primarily an exercise in language mimicry (though it is that too, and pleasingly). Laura Miller’s review induced me to it, though the review doesn’t and maybe can’t give a good sense of just how delightful the book is. Most of us who aren’t seeking tenure won’t care how much it relates to 18th Century antecedents or 20th Century recreations of those antecedents; we care if the book is any good and gives pleasure, and it does. The machinations of money and money transfer drive the plot: has the first great novel that turns on Bitcoin or Ethereum been written, yet? Long before digital coinage, Mr. Smith shows in New York, in 1746, and says little of himself, but he presents a bill for cash. The counting-house man, Mr. Lovell, wants to know, as does the reader, “What is this thing? And who are you?” Smith says, “What it seems to be. What I seem to be. A paper worth a thousand pounds; and a traveler who owns it.” The dialogue on the pages that follow is a witty duel, and Lovell reminds Smith that “Commerce is trust, sir. Commerce is need and need together, sir.” Can Smith and Lovell trust each other? And why? The trust is not only commercial but romantic and sexual as well: Lovell has a pair of daughters, who are intrigued by this curious man, who is rich—or is he? If he is attempting to steal money, what else might he attempt to steal?

The sentences satisfy, and the style is winkingly old, with many clauses strung together: “As a mason must build a wall one brick at a time, though the finished wall be smooth and sheer, so in individual pieces did Mr. Smith’s consciousness return to him, the next day, as he lay in the truckle bed of Mrs. Lee’s gable-end bedroom, and assembled the world again.” Or: “Mr. Lovell, to whom few things retained the force of novelty, and who misliked extremely the sensation when they did, as if firm ground underfoot had been replaced on the instant by a scrabbling fall in vacuo—was, at the moment the door opened on Broad Way, hesitating in his parlour.” We learn much about Mr. Lovell, there, and why he may be unusually suspicious of Smith, whose novelty continues through the novel. He is busy watching others, but he “failed to perceive, as he reflected and considered, that others were meanwhile reflecting and considering upon him.” His perspective seems stable at first, but he is often surprised, as his own assumptions about others prove wrong. First impressions are often dashed, as are second-, third-, and fourth impressions. The best impression of the novel may be not the first time through but the second, when what seem to be minor, though depressing, details, like Smith noticing “a coffle of shuffling black men in irons underscoring the street music with a dismal clank.”

Still: antecedents. Golden Hill reminds me of John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, though Golden Hill is blessedly shorter. The Sot-Weed Factor is amazing, but too many plot turns leaves one reeling and discombobulated, like an excess of drink; as with many things is life, some is good and too much is not better, and by the midpoint of The Sot-Weed Factor a yearning for resolution sets in, and tedium overcomes investment. Like Golden Hill, it decides to situate, as best it can, the reader in the mind of a man from centuries ago. There is much happening in Golden Hill’s many metaphors. Septimus tells Smith, “the ships come and go again, and the most part of the traffic of souls passes straight through. They walk up from the slips to the streets and are gone; the continent devours them. New-York is but a gullet. Few stay.” “A gullet:” a piece of the digestive track, and few of us wish to be subjected to digestion. The New World was brutal, then. Death everywhere, and, horribly, “we have no theatre” in New York. Naturally, a play is eventually got up, and plays into the rest of the book, which is braided tightly together, the early parts reappearing in the later.

The way Golden Hill speaks of today’s dilemmas garbed in the past is interesting, but maybe most interesting is the way that it, like The Name of the Rose, is a text composed of other texts, and made the better for it. The hook, though, remains the plot: it is in motion, with the plays within plays within plays, and political theater and theater theater are much the same—as they are today and likely will be tomorrow. Each time I felt sure-footed reading Godlen Hill, something shifted, and left me off balance, in a way that’s hard to describe easily felt as a reader. I didn’t foresee the ending, though it seems obvious in retrospect: a bit ridiculous, and with some unlikely elements, but it fits. “Where do you get your ideas?” is among the least good questions that can be asked, and yet this novel combines elements so unexpectedly that I’d like to ask its author about them.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America — Conor Dougherty

August 21, 2020 By in Books, Cities, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America is up there with The Rent Is Too Damn High, where it foregrounds what should be if not the top, then one of the top policy issues in the country. “Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build: When California’s housing crisis slammed into a wealthy suburb, one public servant became a convert to a radically simple doctrine” is an excerpt that gives much of the book’s flavor. While I personally like books and papers that use abstract reasoning to make their points, most people don’t, and need stories to understand the world: “Build Build Build” uses Steve Falk’s story to explain why even liberty-shy Californians are sometimes coming around to letting the state change a bit. Most importantly, a baby boomer like him began to see that his own kids’s lives were being constricted by the odious zoning monster that almost all municipalities in California have fed:

Mr. Falk began his career on the local control side of that debate. But somewhere along the Deer Hill odyssey, he started to sympathize with his insurrectionist opponents. His son lived in San Francisco and paid a fortune to live with a pile of roommates. His daughter was a dancer in New York, where the housing crunch was just as bad. It was hard to watch his kids struggle with rent and not start to think that maybe Ms. Trauss had a point.

New York and San Francisco are strangling their young, and even their middle-aged, in ways that many local politicians aren’t adequately grappling with. Golden Gates expertly surfaces ideas about what is or should be “normal” and whether those things should be normal:

Patterned on the American mind, in ways we rarely stop to notice, are layers of zoning and land-use rules that say what can be built where. They are so central to how American cities look and operate that they have become a kind of geographic DNA that forms our opinion of what seems proper and right.

But what is perceived as normal—what is “patterned”—may not be “proper and right,” even if what’s regarded as “proper and right” gets unfairly mapped to normal. The “layers” of zoning and other rules occur at the neighborhood level, city level, sometimes the county level, and sometimes the state level: each veto point chokes off potential projects and creates a kind of suffocating conformity that has drained cities’s vitality, without many people noticing. Somehow, preventing anyone from doing much of anything almost anywhere is said to increase vitality: instead, we get suffocating rents, millennials who are now themselves reaching into middle age and yet often feel they can’t afford to have kids, because who’s going to pay the rent, let alone the health insurance and the student loans?

We need more freedom and greater liberalization—or at least that’s the framing that I’d choose, using the thinking behind George Lakoff’s work on the language of political ideas. Oddly, though, the most reactionary groups in local housing fights tend to frame themselves as preserving freedom—the freedom from having other people make any changes in their neighborhoods. The result, as Doherty writes, is that “In effect, we shattered urban regions into a constellation of smallish cities and reactionary single-family house neighborhoods whose influence over local land use decisions give them an astounding amount of control over how much shelter we build, where, and at what cost.” The problem goes back decades—”City planners started documenting the urban housing shortage in the 1970s, and in the decades since economists have shown that many of the country’s highest-income regions have become so expensive that they have all but gated out middle-class jobs and people”—but problems that compound enough over time become enormous and menacing.

Housing can’t be both a good investment and an affordable place to live. Preferring one goal intrinsically compromises the other. For the last five decades, we’ve tried to make housing an investment that yields above-market returns: consequently, it’s now incredibly expensive in many productive cities. Perhaps the biggest way we may see changes in this dynamic is through changes in the composition of renters versus owners. Invitation Homes is now one of the largest landlords in the country, and it specializes in buying single-family houses (or “oneplexes”) and renting them out. That’s it. The company has realized that the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon is also a business opportunity. Airbnb exists in part because most cities forbid hoteliers from building sufficient hotel capacity—so renting private housing units is an arbitrage on those rules. Canvas Co-Living is a startup that is working to allow “facilitated shared homes.”

Golden Gates’s best story may be that of Sonja Truss, a woman who was tired of the Bay Area’s relentless housing cost increases—so she decided to do something about it:

But for a young adult with no obvious signs of intoxication to show up at a midday city meeting to say she was just generally in favor of housing because San Francisco didn’t have enough of it? That made no sense. Nobody attended eight-hour city meetings if they didn’t have to, and while the planning commission was a place of arguments and strange behavior, it was also a place where people at least knew where each other’s lanes were.

She decided to scramble the lanes, by arguing that the problem isn’t too much housing but too little. She finds herself in weird ideological waters, because many people who proclaim their progressive bonafides are more conservative, in many ways, than the current occupant of the White House. Labeling one’s opponents is a big deal in Bay Area politics: “Only in San Francisco would a gay man who opposed the death penalty and marched in the local BDSM festival in leather straps have to argue he was truly of the left.” There are lots of racial politics involved too: many of the kinds of people who want to proclaim themselves to be opposed to racism nonetheless support housing and development policies that are racist in practice and effect.

Another chapter discusses Factory_OS, a company that’s trying to do modular building. Housing is expensive for many reasons, with zoning at the top of the list—but the actual cost of construction is high, and, in many high-cost metros, the zoning drives up the cost of construction. Why? As zoning artificially restricts housing construction, the construction workers who build new housing have to pay more for existing housing, which means that they have to be paid more by anyone trying to build housing. One gets a kind of perverse ratchet that, again, ends with absurdities like San Francisco. Modular housing, like cross-laminated timber, promises to reduce the cost of building. Unfortunately, building a housing factory is expensive up front, and the returns are spread across many years—leaving a wide space for bankruptcy. Previous efforts at modular housing have tended to fail when the market turns and the maker goes out of business. Dougherty points out that a recession could doom Factory_OS and its competitors. As of this writing, we’re already likely in the worst recession since 2008, and that was the worst since the Great Depression. What happens with the COVID Recession remains to be seen (the recession is made worse by many laid-off people being stuck with expensive leases and mortgages, due to decades of failure to build enough housing). One of the best ways to be successful in business is to start while a rising economy naturally lifts your company. Many business geniuses are really people with lucky timing—which isn’t to knock them: I’d love to have lucky timing too. As of July 23 2020, it appears that Google has promised to invest more money in Factory_OS, so the company is still presumably alive. But it has an ominously small number of mentions in the media over the last year.

One major thing might break the zoning logjam: by now, intellectuals and investors know the single-family zoning racket and know that single-family zoning is designed to enrich property owners. It’s not hard to figure out how to profit from above-market returns, as Invitation Homes has: buy the asset. But as investment funds buy single-family properties, the composition of renters versus owners will change, and more renters will be part of the voting pool. If renters can figure out how supply and demand work—a big “if,” given anti-market bias—they’ll vote to expand the supply of housing. So far, we’ve not seen much of this dynamic, but, as the costs of housing continue to increase, we might see more of it as people go looking for answers. Voters can ineffectively blame landlords and “greedy” developers, or they can effectively look for solutions. Golden Gates is part of the solutions firmament, if enough people read it and change their behavior based on new knowledge. That’s a big “if,” however.

To me, it remains strange and interesting that many people who are superficially interested in lowering housing costs won’t believe that the obvious solution, known for centuries—since the time of Adam Smith—to high prices is greater supply. Any solution that is not “more supply” will entail shortages. We can’t legislate away supply and demand. Yet a common urban trope involves blaming the people attempting to respond to price signals with more product for being “greedy.” The ineffectiveness of this response is obvious, but until recently there’s been no organized political response to the problem. Dougherty is chronicling that response—and telling the stories of the people responding.

A review in an interesting venue. There should be bipartisan support for zoning reform.

Bringing Up Bébé – Pamela Druckerman

February 1, 2020 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , 2 Comments

This is really a book about how to do things, and about how the way we do things says things about who we are. Fiction is often about culture and so is Bringing Up Bébé. Cross-cultural comparisons are (still) underrated and we should do more of them; you can think of Michel Houellebecq’s work as being about the dark side of France and Druckerman’s as being about the light side of France (noting that she’s a transplanted American). Bringing Up Bébé is a parenting book, yes, but also a living book—that is, how to live. I bought it, let it sit around for a while, and only started it when I couldn’t find anything else to read, only to be delighted, and surprised. Let me quote from a section of the book; each new paragraph is a separate section, but put them together and one can see the differences between American-style families and French-style families:

French experts and parents believe that hearing “no” rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires.

As with teaching kids to sleep, French experts view learning to cope with “no” as a crucial step in a child’s evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own.

French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them. To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration.

Walter Mischel says that capitulating to kids starts a dangerous cycle: “If kids have the experience that when they’re told to wait, that if they scream, Mommy will come and the wait will be over, they will very quickly learn not to wait. Non-waiting and screaming and carrying on and whining are being rewarded.”

“You must teach your child frustration” is a French parenting maxim.

As with sleep, we tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.

Since the ’60s, American parents seem to have become less inclined to say no and let kids live with some frustration, and yet we need some frustration and difficulty in order to become whole people. I’m sure many teachers and professors are reading the quotes above and connecting them to their own classroom experiences. The tie into Jean Twenge’s book iGen and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind is almost too obvious to state; Haidt and Twenge’s books concern what smartphones are doing to the state of education, educational discourse, and educational institutions, and, while they cover smartphones and social media, those two technologies aren’t occurring in isolation. Excessive permissiveness appears to create neuroticism, unhappiness, and fragility, and excessive permissiveness seems to start for American parents somewhere between a few weeks and a few months after birth—and it never ends. But most of us don’t recognize it in the absence of an outside observer, the same way we often don’t recognize our psychological challenges in the absence of an outside observer.

In Druckerman’s rendition, French parents are good at establishing boundaries, saying “no” and, with babies, implementing “the pause”—that is, not rushing to to the baby’s aid every time the baby makes some small noise or sound. She writes about how the way many children are “stout,” to use the French euphemism for “fat,” comes from not having established mealtimes but instead of having continuous snacking, in part because parents won’t say “No, you need to wait” to their kids.

Failing to create reasonable boundaries from an early age leads to the failure to develop emotional resilience. “Reasonable” is an important word: it is possible to be strict or to let kids struggle too much, just as it’s possible to do the opposite, and the right mix will likely depend on the kid or the situations.

French parenting culture spills into schools:

When Benoît took a temporary posting at Princeton, he was surprised when students accused him of being a harsh grader. “I learned that you had to say some positive things about even the worst essays,” he recalls. In one incident, he had to justify giving a student a D. Conversely, I hear that an American who taught at a French high school got complaints from parents when she gave grades of 18:20 and 20:20. The parents assumed that the class was too easy and that the grades were “fake.”

The whines I got from students also make sense: in many U.S. schools, there’s not as strong a culture of excellent as there is a culture of “gold stars for everyone.” I understand the latter desire, having felt it myself in many circumstances, but it’s also telling how important a culture of excellence is once the school train tracks end and the less-mapped wilderness of the “real world” (a phrase that is misused at times) begins.

I routinely get feedback that class is too hard, likely because most classes and professors have no incentive to fight grade inflation, and the easiest way to get along is for them to pretend to learn and us to pretend to teach. Real life, however, is rarely an “everybody gets an A” experience, and almost no one treats it that way: most people who eat bad food at a bad restaurant complain about it; most people whose doctor misses a diagnosis complain about the miss (and want excellence, not just kindness); most people prefer the best consumer tech products, like MacBook Airs or Dell XPS laptops, not the “good try” ones. Excellence itself is a key aspect of the real world but is often underemphasized in the current American education system (again, it is possible to over-emphasize it as well).

In my own work as a grant writing consultant, “good job” never occurs if the job is not good, and “you suck” sometimes occurs even if the job is good. Clients demand superior products and most people can’t write effectively, so they can’t do what I do. I’m keen to impart non-commodity skills that will help differentiate students from the untrained and poorly educated masses, but this demands a level of effort and precision beyond what most American schools seem to expect.

Having read Bringing Up Bébé, I’m surprised it’s not become a common read among professors and high school teachers—I think because it’s pitched as more of a parenting book and a popular “two different cultures” book. But it’s much subtler and more sociological than I would have thought, so perhaps I bought into its marketing too. There is also much to be said for how to teach and think about teaching in this book. The French are arguably too strict and too mean to students. Americans are probably not strict enough, not demanding enough, and don’t set adequate standards. The optimal place is likely somewhere between the extremes.

Druckerman is also funny: “I realize how much I’ve changed when, on the metro one morning, I instinctively back away from the man sitting next to the only empty seat, because I have the impression that he’s deranged. On reflection, I realize my only evidence for this is that he’s wearing shorts.” Could shorts not be an indication of derangement? And Druckerman cops to her own neuroticisms, which a whole industry of parenting guides exists to profit from:

What makes “Is It Safe?” so compulsive is that it creates new anxieties (Is it safe to make photocopies? Is it safe to swallow semen?) but then refuses to allay them with a simple “yes” or “no.” Instead, expert respondents disagree with one another and equivocate.

Bébé is a useful contrast from the France depicted in Houellebecq novels. Same country, very different vantages. In Druckerman’s France, the early childhood education system works fairly well, not having to have a car is pleasant, food isn’t a battle, and pleasant eroticism seems to fuel most adults’s lives—including parents’s. “Pleasant” is used twice deliberately. In Houellebecq’s France, empty nihilism reigns, most people are isolated by their attachment to machines, and and most actions are or feel futile.

So who’s right? Maybe both writers. But Druckerman may also point to some reasons why France, despite pursuing many bad economic policies at the country level, is still impressively functional and in many ways a good place to live. The country’s education system is functioning well and so is its transit systems—for example, Paris’s Metro is being massively expanded, at a time when the U.S. is choking on traffic and struggling with absurdly high subway costs that prevent us from building out alternatives. New York’s last main trunk subway line was completed before World War II. Small and useful extensions have been completed since, but there is no substitute for opening a dozen or more new stations and 10+ miles at a time. Improved subway access reduces the need for high-cost cars and enables people to live better lives—something France is doing but the U.S. seems unable to achieve. AAA estimates the average total cost of an American car to be $9,282. If French people can cut that to say $3,000 (taxes included) for subways, the French may be able to do a lot more with less.

France’s bad macro policies and overly rigid labor market may be offset by good childcare and transit policies; Bébé could help explain why that is. Druckerman says, “Catering to picky kids is a lot of work” (“cater” appears four times in Bébé). If the French don’t do that, Americans may be spending a lot of hours at work, rather than leisure, that the French aren’t spending—therefore raising the total quality of French life. Mismeasurement is everywhere, and, while I don’t want to praise France too much on the basis of a single work, I can see aspects of French culture that make sense and aspects of American culture that, framed correctly, don’t.

Conversations with Friends — Sally Rooney

December 10, 2019 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , 1 Comment

You may have been fooled by the New Yorker profile of Sally Rooney, as I was, but don’t be: Conversations with Friends is boring—there’s nothing horribly wrong with it but little right with it either. There is some juvenile BS on almost every page; if you haven’t read the books listed here quit this review now and go pick up some of. It’s hard to find representative sentences in Conversations because they’re all representative, and flat: “He never usually trailed off his sentences this way. He started to feel agitated. I said again I didn’t mean to be distant with him. I didn’t understand what he was trying to say and I was afraid of what it might have been.” We get pages and pages like this. Also: “never usually?” Or, “I felt his body then, his heat and complex weight.” Complex weight? As opposed to simple weight?

The book is about a girl’s affair with a married man, and she kinda sorta tries polyamory lite, but without thinking much about it or having any social or community structure for it. Conversations a “kinda sorta” sort of book, which is why it’s so unsatisfying. The sentences are short and it’s easy to skip sentences, paragraphs, pages, without losing anything. Still, Conversations gives hope to unpublished writers, because if it can get published and pushed, you might be able to too.

I want the protagonist to get a job on a fishing boat, or building rockets for SpaceX, or working in an emergency room, or doing anything, anywhere, apart from interning for literary agents and spending too much time listening to professors or living in libraries. There is a world beyond university humanities departments, thankfully, but it is opaque to Frances and her friends. Conversations are fine, but conversations among people with no goals, no dreams, and no purpose lead one to wonder why they aren’t short stories.

Not every book needs to challenge and this one doesn’t. It’s the literary equivalent of an anodyne meal at a “new American” restaurant that does the same thing thousands of similar establishments do. It won’t offend or wow anyone. If this is the “millennial novel,” we have nothing to fear but our own emptiness, and the social media we use to try and stuff the emptiness into some shape. But you could do worse; I read to the end but am also trying not to do the classic bad critic move of generalizing from specific individuals to much larger groups. If I were to do that, I would draw much different sociological or demographic conclusions than have others I’ve read. So much art really is read as simply confirming our priors.

The Seventh Function of Language — Laurent Binet

August 26, 2019 By in Academia, Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

The Seventh Function of Language is wildly funny, at least for the specialist group of humanities academics and those steeped in humanities academic nonsense of the last 30 – 40 years. For everyone else, it may be like reading a prolonged in-joke. Virtually every field has its jokes that require particular background to get (I’ve heard many doctors tell stories whose punchline is something like, “And then the PCDH level hit 50, followed by an ADL of 200!” Laughter all around, except for me). In the novel, Roland Barthes doesn’t die from a typical car crash in 1980; instead, he is murdered. But by who, and why?

A hardboiled French detective (or “Superintendent,” which is France’s equivalent) must team up with a humanities lecturer to find out, because in the world of The Seventh Function it’s apparent that a link exists between Barthes’s work and his murder. They don’t exactly have a Holmes and Watson relationship, as neither Bayard (the superintendent) or Herzog (the lecturer) make brilliant leaps of deduction; rather, both complement each other, each alternating between bumbling and brilliance. Readers of The Name of the Rose will recognize both the detective/side-kick motif as well as the way a murder is linked to the intellectual work being done by the deceased. In most crime fiction—as, apparently, in most crime—the motives are small and often paltry, if not outright pathetic: theft, revenge, jealousy, sex. “Money and/or sex” pretty much summarizes why people kill (and perhaps why many people live). That sets up the novel’s idea, in which someone is killed for an idea.

The novel’s central, unstated joke is that, in the real world, no one would bother killing over literary theory because literary theory is so wildly unimportant (“Bayard gets the gist: Roland Barthes’s language is gibberish. But in that case why waste your time reading him?”). At Barthes’s funeral, Bayard thinks:

To get anywhere in this investigation, he knows that he has to understand what he’s searching for. What did Barthes possess of such value that someone not only stole it from him but they wanted to kill him for it too?

The real world answer is “nothing.” He, like other French intellectuals, has nothing worth killing over. And if you have nothing conceivably worth killing over, are your ideas of any value? The answer could plausibly be “yes,” but in the case of Barthes and others it is still “no.” And the money question structures a lot of relations: Bayard thinks of Foucault, “Does this guy earn more than he does?”

Semiotics permeates:

Many is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere: in the color of his wife’s coat, in the stripe on the door of his car, in the eating habits of the people next door, in France’s monthly unemployment figures, in the banana-like taste of Beaujolais nouveau (for it always tastes either like banana or, less often, raspberry. Why? No one knows, but there must be an explanation, and it is semiological.)…

There are also various amusing authorial intrusions and one could say the usual things about them. The downside of The Seventh Function is that its underlying thrust is similar to the numerous other academic novels out there; if you’ve read a couple, you’ve read them all. The upsides are considerable, however, among them the comedy of allusion and the gap between immediate, venal human behavior and the olympian ideas enclosed in books produced by often-silly humans. If the idea stated in the book and the author’s behavior don’t match, what lesson should we take from that mismatch?

Trick Mirror — Jia Tolentino

August 17, 2019 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I read one of the essays in a magazine, but the book as a whole is dubious. Take the introduction: she writes that she wrote the book “between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018” which was, she says, “a stretch of time when daily experience seemed both like a stopped elevator and an endless state-fair ride, when many of us regularly found ourselves thinking that everything had gotten as bad as we could possibly imagine, after which, of course, things got worse.” “As bad as we could possibly imagine?” That’s a real deficit of imagination, then. As bad as things were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? As during the Able Archer exercise, which the Soviet Union almost took as preparation for nuclear war? As bad as even the Great Recession in 2009? Has Tolentino and “many of us” read Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment now?

Tolentino writes that one of her essays is “about ‘optimization,’ and the rise of athleisure as late-capitalist fetishwaear.” First, athleisure is not, to my knowledge, associated at all with fetish sexual practices (I could be wrong on that but didn’t see any citations or experiences to the contrary in the essay). Second, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “late capitalism” intelligently defined, or that I’ve ever read a sentence that was improved by including the phrase. How do we know we’re in late capitalism? Is it possible we’re experiencing early capitalism? She later writes that our world is “utterly consumed by capitalism.” What’s that mean? What’s the alternative? We’ve seen examples of the state directing all or almost all economic activity (the Soviet Union, Venezuela), and the result is not good.

It’s also neither clear nor evident that “capitalism” is the best way to analyze many of the Internet platforms. To the extent capitalism involves monetary exchange, I don’t pay Twitter and Twitter doesn’t pay me; same with Facebook or Google. If I’m a business, advertising, I might. And if you don’t like the social media advertising business models, you can also host your own blog. That almost no one does, tells us something, but it’s something Tolentino doesn’t want to get to.

There are assertions like “Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture.” Really? “Mass media?” Why not technology? Or why don’t politics and culture shape mass media? What way does the causal arrow run?

A while ago, “Nice for What? A comic’s look at dating now” appeared:

As Arts & Letters Daily puts it, “When did campy misandry become contemporary shorthand for communicating one’s feminist bona fides?” A favorite line: “Having a relationship is a lot like writing: To be good at it, you have to be interested in other people and believe you have something interesting to offer them in return. Many people who pursue either do so poorly because they are actually interested only in themselves.”

You can apply a lot of “Nice for What’s?” analysis to Trick Mirror, but with “the Internet” (exalted and degraded, parent and child, god and satan) standing in for men. Trick Mirror is a very well done version of the Brooklyn hipster writer worldview. Whether that worldview is correct, I will leave to readers.

It’s always been hard to make it in the arts. In some ways, the Internet makes it harder (the supply of writing, video, and photo is way up); in some ways, it makes it easier (it’s possible to become visible in a way that wasn’t in 1980). Today, writing is an incredible secondary skill but a harder primary skill: I see that in Seliger + Associates, where the blog is now a primary marketing mechanism. I also see it in the way every third English major I knew tried to make it as a freelance writer after college. Excess supply relative to demand has predictable effects on prices.

As a reader, the Internet is great: cheap books in the world’s largest used bookstore (finding ones really worth reading is the hard part). Niche interest books are written and made available like they couldn’t be before.

Many people take to the Internet to complain about the Internet. We can choose to live predominantly offline. What should we infer from the fact that many of us, including, it seems, Tolentino, choose not to?

As is too common, the author needs to read more evolutionary biology. Who are women competing for? Why? How does women’s intrasex competition tend to work? Then do the same with men. Many of the answers are out there, but they’re rarely discussed in MFA and English programs. Trick Mirror is a book partially about unexamined assumptions that nonetheless seems to import an awful lot of unexamined assumptions of its own. It’s got a better book lurking inside it, and that’s why it’s frustrating. A bad book is easy to dismiss and a good book is easy to love.

Almost all the reviews I’ve read have been too dutiful and too fawning. Over time it’s become apparent that many book reviews are written for insiders and by insiders, so the exceptions stand out.

City of Girls — Elizabeth Gilbert

June 20, 2019 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

City of Girls is Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, and it’s well-summarized by its protagonist’s comment on a play: “To my mind, there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues. They made me happy. They were designed to make people happy without making the audience work too hard to understand what was going on.” If you want a fun story about being young in the 1940 – 1960 area, with lots of sporting that doesn’t involve a foot-, basket-, soccer-, or ping-pong ball, this is that book. Had someone less famous written it, it likely wouldn’t have been noticed, but that’s not the case, so it has been, or is being, noticed. There’s some weak prose and many interesting moments, and the beginning effectively and rightly tells you not to work too hard, only for you to realize by the end that you’ve been deceived. It tells you not to work too hard and to have fun instead frequently: “People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it,” lest you forget. And it lulls you. I was lulled. In a lot of books, characters focused on frivolous and intense pleasures get a comeuppance; in this one, they just have a good time, a bit like Funny Girl.

There’s a lot of great dialogue, which I can be a sucker for:

“Isn’t it your theater, Peg?”
“Technically, yes. But I can’t do anything without Olive, Billy. You know that. She’s essential.”
“Essential but bothersome.”
“Yes, but you are only one of those things. I need Olive. I don’t need you. That’s always been the difference between you.”

Almost no character says what they mean and means what they say, delightfully. Yet early comedy moves into later pathos, and this is a paragraph, from the end of the novel, expressing ideas we see expressed too infrequently in the Internet, social media age:

In that moment, I felt overcome by a sense of mercy—not only for Frank, but also for that younger version of myself. I even felt mercy for Walter, with all his pride and condemnation. How humiliated Walter must have felt by me, and how dreadful it must have been for him to feel exposed like that in front of someone he considered a subordinate—and Walter considered everyone a subordinate. How angry he must have been, to have to clean up my mess in the middle of the night. Then my mercy swelled…

It seems there are many stories passed around online that could do with a little bit of mercy and understanding—thoughts and emotions hard to fit into a Tweet. Twitter is low-context medium, novels are full of context, and life has the most context of all, if we can notice it.

The playhouse where most of the novel occurs is like a startup: “I had nobody to report to and nothing was expected of me. If I wanted to help out with costumes, I could, but I was given no formal job.” Except in a startup, every duty is expected of everyone, but the lack of formality is because without constant effort, nothing happens. There are things I didn’t know exist—what exactly are “doeskin trousers?” The eye for fashion is novel to me. It’s not a type of leather, as I’d assumed: “It is similar to duvetyn, but lighter; usually softer and less densely napped than melton.” That clears things right up.

Most of all, City of Girls is about what it means to be a child versus an adult—an idea I missed the first time through. The adults pay for their fun with personal responsibility; the kids don’t, or don’t quite, and learn to deal with responsibility for frivolity and pleasure. Vivian is a kind of early Karley Sciortino, without some aspects of sex-positive modern culture to fall back on.

The book is humane: it doesn’t feel political and almost none are purely types; the absence of outright villains and heroes refreshes. The characters’s many weaknesses are not signs of evil, but signs of humanity. Weaknesses don’t cancel a person’s existence, particularly because weaknesses are often the flipsides of strengths. On some level these points are obvious, yet we seem to forget them easily, particularly but not exclusively on the Internet.

A so-so interview with Gilbert.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero — Tyler Cowen

April 15, 2019 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The question underlying Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero is, “How can problems best be identified and solved?” (Although the book is much more interesting than my question may imply.) Sometimes individuals acting alone are the best agents; sometimes groups of individuals who agree to be lassoed together under a corporate aegis are the best agents (that is a long way of saying “business”); sometimes government(s) are the best agents, depending on the type, scale, and fixability of the problem(s). Many political arguments are essentially arguments that want to move problem domains or solutions from one of these classes to another.

Pages 22 – 23 deal with industries that exist despite selling products that, at the very least, likely don’t do what proponents say they will do—industries like dentistry, stockbrokers, sales reps, and food. The food industry is particularly notable, as a lot of food is what Michael Pollan calls “edible foodlike substances.” Another way of looking at those products, though, is that they’re selling hope or reassurance, and people like buying hope much more than they like buying evidence-backed products. Consumer Reports is not all that popular and their evaluations rarely if ever go viral. Perhaps most importantly, a lesson from industries Cowen cites, like dietary supplements, is that most people have bad epistemic hygiene—and, in most circumstances, don’t care about it. I spent much time attempting to teach undergraduates research strategies and how to evaluate claims and sources, and most of the time I wasn’t very successful. It took too long for me to realize that, rather than start with peer review, publication reliability, and that kind of thing, I need to start with a question: “How do you know what you know?” From there, it’s possible to build out towards epistemic hygiene, but the overwhelming majority of students seemed not to give a shit, and, indeed, if you go around asking normal people questions like, “How do you know what you know?” they will at best look at you strangely and at worst leave to talk to someone else about fun topics—at least, I speculate that that may happen.

Human rationality is often not that strong, and we like to give ourselves reasons for our failures while castigating others for theirs. People working in businesses are often engaging in similar activities and ways of arguing.

“How do you know what you know?” is a context question, and Cowen is a great expert in context. He asks us to “step back and consider what standard we are measuring business against. The propensity of business to commit fraud is essentially just an extension of the propensity of people to commit fraud.” The problem is mostly within us, rather than in the specific structures of business.

The chapter “Is Work Fun?” resonates:

I am not trying to whitewash the burdens of the workday and the workplace. Nonetheless, a lot of the other evidence points us toward the more positive side of work. Work provides us with a lot of what we value in life, including affirmation of our social worth, a structure for problem solving combined with rewards, and an important source of social interactions [. . .]

Yet we can rarely say as much in public or among our friends. Why not?

This paragraph is also characteristic of Cowen’s thought, where words like “but” and “nonetheless” play key roles. He’s really trying to get us to rejigger our levels. The “burdens” are real, but so are the benefits, even if those aren’t emphasized. Cowen is great at connecting ideas that are underemphasized and not often foregrounded. Chapter 9 asks us, “If Business Is So Good, Why Is It So Disliked?” Many possible answers are advanced. I will add one that I didn’t see or that I missed: it is easier to blame abstract “business” than ourselves.

I want to quote the book’s last sentence and paragraph but would prefer you to experience it after reading all of Big Business.

One chapter discusses tech companies; many of the criticisms against tech companies are misguided, as you’ve read here. More vitally, I see those criticisms as really being criticisms of individual people. If we, collectively, wanted to, we could all switch to DuckDuckGo for search—a boon for privacy—and many of us could be using Linux as a primary desktop operating system, especially today, when so much software is delivered via the browser. Dell offers high-quality Linux laptops, and using Linux is probably an improvement for privacy; homing beacons and tracking seem much less prevalent in open-source software. Yet most of us—including me when it comes to Linux—don’t choose the privacy-focused option. We don’t choose free software. We choose convenience. Is that the fault of tech companies or individual choices? To me, it looks a lot like we see the faults of tech companies when we look in the mirror in the morning. The number of people who really care about freedom, broadly defined, seems to be small, and far smaller than the number of people who say they care about freedom. Most people want convenience more than freedom or privacy, just as most people want junk food more than they want physical health. To return to my photography examples, most people want greater sharing convenience than the best image quality or artistic effect.

It’s possible to imagine an even more pro-business book than this one; a company like Amazon is amazing, for example, in that what I order, almost always shows up, and it’s convenient too. Contrast that with the many dealings I’ve had lately with New York’s tax office; I could go into detail, but the reader would likely want to stab their eyes out, as I have often wanted to do.

Cowen touches on alternatives to for-corporations:

Another possible way to test the honesty of business would be to compare nonprofit and for-profit organizations. If you think profits induce corruption, you might then conclude that nonprofits should be especially trustworthy. The evidence, however, will show that for-profits and nonprofits, at least if we are comparing enterprises in the same basic economic sector, usually operate in pretty similar ways.

This has been my experience; it’s also apparent to me, having worked for nonprofits for years, that nonprofits are much more like businesses than most people realize. I’ve also spent a lot of time working in and around universities, and they are the ultimate businesses: just try taking classes for grades if you can’t pay tuition. Try returning a low-value, high-cost degree. For a while I’ve been advancing the argument that many parts of the university system are self-interested (and sometimes just bad) actors that have great marketing skills. Most people react to that argument skeptically, but as evidence of student loan burdens grows, the skeptical reaction seems to be declining.

I’m not against nonprofits and the best ones are very important. The science research function at most universities still works fairly well, despite having some well-known incentive problems. The gap between university-in-theory and university-in-practice, though, remains wide, and most universities don’t want to publicize some obvious truths—like the idea that not everyone should go, or that not everyone has the conscientious and IQ necessary to thrive in an academic setting.

Among nonprofits, one possible purpose of the grant system is to keep nonprofits both honest and effective. It is possible to be honest without being particularly effective, and vice-versa. Ideally one wants both. Few of us do both perfectly, despite the way we often demand that others do both perfectly.

One chapter asks whether CEOs are paid too much: Cowen mostly says no, they’re not, and he cites a lot of empirical evidence on the subject. But he also says, “it’s hard to find someone who can both run the day-to-day operations of a company and do these other things [like social media and PR, communication, Congressional and other testimony].” I wonder if it’s really hard to find people who can do those things, or if there’s a kind of weird selection and vetting process going on through which only a small number of people are considered by the relevant people, and thus the number seems smaller than it is because those doing the selecting won’t broaden their search criteria. Think of it as the CEO equivalent of companies that only want to hire from certain schools that reject as many qualified applicants as they admit. I also wonder what level of compensation, if any, is necessary for satiation: many CEOs seem to reach, and to have reached, that level long before. Can we shift from money to some other yardstick? If so, how?

Is the business world changing faster than it used to? If so, is agility more important than it used to be? Many businesses may not be “set it and forget it” anymore (if they ever were). My personal favorite example is camera companies: standalone camera shipments have been dropping for the last six years, and the response of photo company CEOs has mostly been to shrug. No companies have made substantial efforts towards making their camera bodies into smartphones combined with superior image sensors. As a result, Apple and Google have come to dominate the imaging and video worlds, while camera makers seem to lack the agility necessary to compete. In many consumer industries, competition seems to be increasing; to cite another example I’m familiar with, large bike companies like Trek are facing a host of Internet startups like State, Priority, and numerous others that source direct from China and Taiwan. Innovators in electric bikes have not been the biggest companies. Low agility may result in eroding market share and profits. The future is happening and it doesn’t seem to be happening evenly, to everyone.

The modesty of many Big Business claims stand out: “[CEO pay in the aggregate] could be better, but it works much more effectively than many people think.” “Much more effectively than many people think” could still be not all that effective; in this and in many other sections, Cowen is trying to move the needle a bit. He’s describing situations with a large number of potential analogue, intermediary places, and in this he’s moving against the modern Twitter tendency to see things as binary: good or bad, zero or one, shit or brilliant. Most of things in the most of the world are in this intermediary space, including all humans, however virtuous all Twitters may portray themselves to be (in contrast to their vile enemies).

Big Business is much more story-based than one might expect from Cowen, who argues that we should be more suspicious of simple stories. Fortunately, Big Business is not a simple book.

As with all the Cowen books I’ve read, there’s much to think about and much more I could write here; he is very good at finding the space where “rarely argued/articulated” and “possibly correct” intersect. Common arguments and ideas are common, and incorrect or ridiculous ideas are common, but finding the Cowen quadrant is too rare. I sometimes worry that my own ideas are too common to be worth repeating. Finding ones that hit the Cowen quadrant is satisfying, like a deadlift PR.

The world is filled with problems and our goal as humans is to solve them until we die. We very rarely see life formulated in that way, but maybe we should say this explicitly more often. “What problems have you solved recently?” may be a more valuable question than, “What do you believe?”