Author Archives: Jake Seliger

Briefly noted: The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind of the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia — Michael Booth

August 17, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction Tags: , , Leave a comment

The Almost Nearly Perfect People is fun and not too doctrinaire, which is part of what makes it fun; I also have a weakness for cross-cultural books in which person from country A shows up in country B and talks about whatever.

almost_nearly_perfectBooth tells us that at one point at least Scandinavia was not the land of almost nearly perfect people, because “At one point in the 1860s, a tenth of all immigrants arriving in the United States were from Scandinavia.” It is hard to say what that says about this point, however. I would’ve liked more discussions about immigration and emigration, because revealed preferences are more interesting than what people say (and it turns out that the same Scandinavians who vote for high taxes will evade them when possible).

Unusual facts abound in the book, although I haven’t checked the truthfulness of those facts, like “More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four—over 20 percent of the working population—do not work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits.” From this, we can maybe conclude that perhaps one good reason to try to concentrate disability and related benefits at the state level in the U.S. is to let people vote with their feet (and their votes) more easily than they might elsewhere.

Still, despite paragraphs like the above, we also find that

there is little doubt, Denmark is becoming a two-tier country. More and more Danes who can afford it are turning to private health care—850,000 at the latest count—and poll after poll shows that, though they have the largest per capita public sector in the world, the Danes’ satisfaction levels with their welfare state are in rapid decline.

There appear to be few ways of correcting problems with public-sector satisfaction. Still, Booth says few Danes complain about taxes. We also find sections about “elves” in Iceland, drinking throughout the countries, a passion for historical re-enactment,

In some ways Scandinavian countries are more like the U.S. than is commonly portrayed. For example, Norway has its own, equally intellectually incoherent Donald Trump-like party:

[The Progress Party] started out in the early seventies as an anti-tax movement. Today, it is run on a hybrid right-win/welfare-state platform of a type which can seem quite odd from a UK or US perspective, blending as it does calls for increased public spending, with emphasis on care for the elderly, together with more conventionally right-wing fear-mongering about non-Western immigrants.

Old people vote, want to take working people’s money, and fear change (immigrants are one manifestation of change). Parties that want to stay in power must appeal to the elderly, and the average age of the population is creeping upwards in virtually every developed country. We’ll see more Progress Parties and Trumps. In Norway, the Progress Party is particularly vituperative about Muslims; in the U.S., Trump is particularly vituperative about Hispanics. Presumably hysterical fear mongering works best when the Other is close enough to get riled up about. Yet, as Booth points out, Muslims identify as perhaps three percent of the Norwegian population.

There is probably too much generalization from stories, sensational, or the mundane in The Almost Nearly Perfect People, but that can be forgiven.

It’s not a book I can imagine wanting to re-read.

Here is a review about “The Nordic Theory of Everything” by Anu Partanen, and I suspect the review is better than the book. Here is my essay “People vote with their feet, and also the U.S. is not Sweden.” Here is “Denmark’s Nice, Yes, But Danes Live Better in U.S.,” which hits related ideas.

Links: Toni Bentley strikes, nude photo non-scandals, against Edenism, demographic shocks, and more

August 15, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Toni Bentley, fervently and brilliantly, on the latest Gay Talese book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

* “Sexism in publishing: ‘My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me, Catherine:’ Author reveals that submitting her manuscript to agents under a male pseudonym brought more than eight times the number of responses.” Most writing on this topic is garbage; this one, by nature of its control group, is not.

* “My Airbnb Nightmare Reality.”

* “The story of Melania Trump’s nude photos shows an unexpected maturity in American life, and the predictably depressing hypocrisy within it, too,” from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker.

* “Against Edenism” by Peter Thiel.

* “Apple will finally be releasing new laptops, after ridiculously long delays.

* “US fertility rate falls to lowest on record” as Americans fail to reproduce themselves, driving the need for more imports (remember this data when you hear some kinds of political rhetoric). And: “More Old Than Young: A Demographic Shock Sweeps the Globe.”

* “The Next Generation of Wireless — “5G” — Is All Hype: The connectivity we crave — cheap, fast, ubiquitous — won’t happen without more fiber in the ground.”

* L.A. isn’t a suburb. It needs to stop being planned like one.

* “What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?” More interesting than maybe it sounds.

People vote with their feet, and also the U.S. is not Sweden

August 9, 2016 By in Cities, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Two pieces about Anu Partanen’s book The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life say much about the blindness of some writers: “Stockholm Syndrome: Spotify threatened to abandon Sweden if the government didn’t address over-regulation and sky-high taxes” is poorly titled and more interesting than the title suggests, and so is “What’s So Special About Finland?” Neither says much about the book itself but both together say much about the U.S. media interest in Nordic countries.

Following the Nordic model would make large parts of the U.S. population worse off; that’s why people are moving away from Nordic-model cities and states and towards inexpensive, laissez-fair cities and states.

Let me elaborate. Partanen and most media people are not normal and have not normal needs, desires, and willingness to pay for big-city amenities. But most people aren’t willing to pay for those things that’s why sprawly cities, especially in Texas, are the ones that’re experiencing the fastest population growth in the U.S. People choose to move to them much more so than New York or L.A. or a handful of other media capitols. Partanen and her husband live in NYC as writers. I get the appeal, but they’re relatively low-earners in the second-most-expensive city in the country, and New York is in many ways least like the rest of the country. Partanen even says:

First of all, the taxes are not necessarily as high as many Americans think. One of the myths I encounter often is that Americans are like, ‘You pay 70 percent of your income in taxes.’ No, we do not. For someone who lives in a city like San Francisco or New York City—where you have federal taxes, state taxes, city taxes, property taxes—the tax burden is not very different [than the tax burden in Finland]. I discuss my own taxes in the book and I discovered this to be true: that I did pay about the same or even more in New York than I would have paid on my income in Finland. I’ve talked to many Nordics in the U.S. who say the same thing.

So SF and NYC are already paying these crazy taxes… and apparently not getting much in return. Why then should the rest of the U.S. seek to emulate them? When I’ve said that I think Seattle is a much better value than NYC, in part because of crazy tax issues, people often respond, “So you don’t like public schools or fire fighters?” But Seattle, Austin, Nashville, and other similar cities seem to have those public services too, without anything like NYC’s cost of living. So the solution to high taxes and not-great services in those cities is to pay even more? If so, I’m not too surprised most of the US does not want to be more like Scandinavia (or SF).

To be fair, it would be interesting to see what happens if SF, NYC, and LA disempowered municipal unions and liberalized their zoning codes, both of which would lower costs substantially. For now, though, we’re seeing all three cities systematically drive people out. They’re choosing places that are not very Scandinavian.

Partanen and her husband are not very representative of the overall American experience. It’d be interesting to read a story about Finnish people who move to relatively inexpensive suburbs, don’t spend an overwhelming amount on housing, and basically like their lives. A European friend of mine, for example, has a sister who was born in a medium-sized European country and is basically doing that in Florida, and she seems to like it.

People who live in NYC are self-selected to be obsessive weirdos (who also often want to write books). Which is fine. I’m one of those people but I’m also aware that I’m atypical.

In short, revealed preferences show that most Americans prefer a non-Nordic model. They also show why state-level taxation is better on average than federal-level taxation, since at least people who don’t like state-level taxation regimes can easily move to another state. Score one for the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty world.

Links: The volt succeeds, the joy of old age, evolutionary mysteries, and intellectuals are freaks

August 8, 2016 By in Links Leave a comment

* GM delivers 100,000th Chevy Volt in the US alone.

* Computing pioneer Alan Kay on AI, Apple and future.

* “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding),” by Oliver Sacks.

* “A Swede Returns to Silicon Valley from China,” which is an interesting perspective I don’t necessarily endorse. Linking does not imply endorsement!

* In The New York Times: “Scientists Ponder an Evolutionary Mystery: The Female Orgasm.”

* The Silicon Valley of Space Start-Ups? It Could be Seattle.

* “The Rifles That Fuel Modern Terror: How the AK-47 and AR-15, ready amplifiers of rage, became weapons of choice for mass killers.”

* “Intellectuals are Freaks: Why professors, pundits, and policy wonks misunderstand the world,” one of my favorite pieces in recent memory.

Moving On — Larry McMurtry

August 7, 2016 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , 4 Comments

Moving On is at least twice as long as it ought to be and probably longer. Which is a shame, because there’s a pretty good book waiting, even wanting to get out, but it’s hidden. Even its author seems to be aware of its flaws. In the introduction he writes:

A rather puzzling thing to me, as I look through the book today, is that it contains so many rodeo scenes. Few novels, then or ever, have attempted to merge the radically incongruent worlds of graduate school and rodeo. I am now completely at a loss to explain why I wished to attempt this.

That “puzzling thing” remains to this reader. In that introduction he also says something odd:

In the late fifties, with no war on, the romance of journalism tarnished, the romance of investment banking yet to flower, graduate school was where many of the liveliest people chose to tarry while deciding what to do next.

moving_onI take McMurtry’s word that “many of the liveliest people” chose grad school at that time, but by the time I started that time had long since vanished and no memory or residue of it remained.

So why read it, or more importantly, why finish it? The novel’s dialogue is often excellent and a a keen sense of humor runs through. In the grad school section we get incongruity like this:

There was a keen look of concentration on [Clara’s] face as she considered William Duffin. Hank had seen the same look on her face the day before when she was trying to decide whether to do her Chaucer paper on the “Knight’s Tale” or the “Prioress’s Tale.” She reached out and held his genitals, still thinking.

That shift in moods from cerebral to carnal is characteristic, as the novel likes to juxtapose mind and body, high and low, love and indifference.

Moving On is also a time capsule. It was published in 1970 and is set in the ’50s or early ’60s. Some problems that seem contemporary have a long pedigree; for example, “vacations” have been awful for children for a long time:

Every other year her parents would decide to go west and would bundle her and her sister Miri into a Cadillac and spend two or three weeks hurrying between scenic spots while the girls read comic books or Nancy Drew mysteries and waited irritably for the Grand Canyon or some other redeeming wonder to appear.

Or, to take another example, Patsy narrates, “She had read a lot about loneliness and knew it was one of the great problems of modern life, but it had never been very real to her” (393). That ought to sound familiar to anyone who’s read 2000’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Or anyone who’s read the New York Times, which is filled with stories about loneliness and the loss of community and so forth.* The interesting thing to me is not the stories about loneliness but the technologies that we often blame for loneliness. I wonder if instead the loneliness comes from within us.

The narrative of ceaseless social and technological change is attractive, but it’s also less true than is commonly assumed.

Moving On is also unusual in that it portrays the boring, discontented parts of marriage and long-term relationships. At one moment Patsy is stuck out on the road with her boring husband Jim, and “She felt cramped and sat with her back against her door, her legs on the seat, the soles of her feet pressed against Jim’s leg. There was nothing to do but watch the distances, gray and wavery with heat, and so endless.” She’s talking about the car trip, but she’s talking about more than that, too. Outside of Mating in Captivity I’ve rarely read those kinds of stories in Patsy’s tone.

Unfortunately, the novel comes to seem “gray and wavery” and “so endless,” at almost 800 reasonably dense pages. It’s like a guest that outstays his welcome. A pity. Much of it is acutely felt and observed. Its length, though, makes it a curiosity more than a must-read.

* Search for the string “loneliness site:nytimes.com” and you’ll find many, many examples. Like: “How Loneliness Can Make You Sick — and Might Even Kill You,” which could have a few dates and words changed and still be the sort of thing Patsy read decades ago.

Links: Desalination, those Melania Trump nudes, Hillbilly Elegy, how to write a novel, and more

August 3, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Israel Proves the Desalination Era is Here: One of the driest countries on earth now makes more freshwater than it needs,” an important point and one I didn’t realize.

* “J.D. Vance and the Anger of the White Working Class: The author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ on his tough upbringing, his new life as one of the ‘elites’ and what communities can do to help.”

* The New York Post and others have dug up nude Melania Trump photos from the ’90s, which I won’t link directly to though they can be easily found; the better media responses have observed that a) there’s nothing wrong with nude photos and b) you shouldn’t attack candidates for their spouses’ non-relevant pasts. Both are true, but many people who identify as Republic likely disagree with them, which is part of the reason the story gets so much play: It reveals hypocrisy.

* “How to Write a Novel,” amusing throughout and it seems that many quality authors use many different systems (or lack of systems). There is not one route to good end product.

* Mark Manson: “Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy?”

* In good news, “Court Rules Former Columbia Student Suspended for Alleged Rape Can Sue for Anti-Male Bias.”

* Oliver Sacks: “Me and My Hybrid,” from 2005, and his points still stand today.

* “The big puzzle in economics today: why is the economy growing so slowly?” Likely to be of interest to politically interested people even if they don’t care for economics in general.

Briefly noted: Undone — John Colapinto

August 2, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Fiction Tags: , Leave a comment

Undone is okay and “John Colapinto Revives the Male-Centric Literary Sex Novel” got me to read it, but the novel is not particularly literary, not particularly sex-obsessed or even interested, and not even all that male-centric. So be prepared to be underwhelmed. I hate to recommend my own work, but if Undone seems remotely appealing to you try The Hook instead.

Undone is not really a page-turner like Gone Girl (and like the blurbs promise). Except among a small crowd of social justice warriors and English professors, it is not really scandalous. Still, like Gone Girl it does challenge the oddly dominant cultural narrative that women are pure and don’t do awful things and don’t manipulate others (including the media) by pandering to victimhood, and in this sense the novel does unsettle slightly contemporary New York Times and NPR thinking. That—not the sex itself, or the desire itself—is what the publishing machinery is talking about when it’s talking about the supposed scandal in Undone. The real discomfort is the challenging of the relentless victimhood narrative; that’s also how it’s like Francine Prose’s Blue Angel functions. Except Blue Angel is narratively more interesting and less obsessed with self loathing. Both do have writer-protagonists. Here’s Jasper, in Undone:

Typing fast, he began to sketch in the villain’s background, tracing his motivations to a childhood of deprivation and cruelty in an orphanage; he started to write notes on the grieving family, conceiving of them as a wealthy clan with deep New England roots. Freed from the agonizing writer’s block that had stalled him for weeks, Jasper wrote rapturously, without pause, stopping only when he heard the ringing of the doorbell.

The scene is very functional, but it’s hard to choose really evocative passages from the book.

I’ve heard guys say variations on the crude phrase, “No pussy is worth prison.” Undone maybe endorses this idea.

Should you read it? Maybe. As it is, reading about this wet rag flopping about is not quite satisfying, and the novel’s antagonists are not as brilliantly nasty as Amy in Gone Girl.

I want all the characters to be weirder and more obsessed and hazier and more like a fairy tale and more willing to go all the way. To be hard core. Being hard core is what’s admirable about a book like The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet. That book has some flaws that numerous critics noted at the time it was released. But it remains essentially literary and essentially hard core in a way most smut isn’t, and that’s what keeps it in the front of the mind when weaker novels are forgotten.

Based on this one I’d read the next Colapinto novel.

Links: New Cowen book, Brexit blues, the horror of public sector unions, cures for cancer, the state of the union and more!

July 29, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* A new Tyler Cowen book is coming out in February; the link goes to the post describing the book (and how to get a free book) and here is a direct Amazon link to The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

* “Brexit Blues,” the best piece on this topic I’ve read, and one of the better for describing Trump. It reminds me of the saying, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Ignorance is expensive in voters round the globe right now.

* “It takes way too long to build new housing in expensive cities.”

* This is why people in the know vehemently opposed public-sector unions: “A Metro worker blamed for falsifying records about the tunnel fans that failed during last year’s deadly smoke incident near L’Enfant Plaza has been granted his job back by an arbitration panel — and Metro’s largest union has just filed a lawsuit against Metro because the worker hasn’t been reinstated yet.” Or see “How police unions actually hurt police officers.” Unfortunately, it looks like the Supreme Court will not save us. Still, it is odd that the left favors public sector unions, since those very unions make the public sector less efficient and more prone to right-wing attacks.

* “How The Cures For Cancer Snuck Up On Us,” good news all round.

* “A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die;” it is hard to say whether the consequences will be very bad, very good, or somewhere in between. The current Republican Party is bad for democracy, the U.S., and itself.

* “How The West Was Won,” which is actually about how and why “Western” culture took over the world because a) it’s popular and b) it’s not so much Western per se as the result of technologically oriented development.

* The pre-order page for Tom Wolfe’s new novel, The Kingdom of Speech. If Wolfe writes it you ought to read it.

* “Apple’s China Problem Is That Local Phones are Good — and Cheap.” I’d expect this to become more of a “problem” for manufacturers and good news for phone users over time, as the market saturates.

* “Why Police Cannot Be Trusted to Police Themselves,” a point that seems increasingly obvious.

* “A Conversation with Michael Orthofer” is the latest conversation with Tyler, and as always it is excellent. This describes me: “A lot of people come away from travel alienated. They don’t always enjoy travel. They may vaguely feel it was good for them. They had to make too many decisions, and they argue with each other.” I think few people who live in big interesting cities know their homes well, and I also think that loneliness / disconnection / anomie is a bigger problem for most people than the marginal trip / vacation, especially now that U.S. airport security theater is so bad.

Links: Kids with out marriage, novels from China, turning phones into laptops, nurses and doctors

July 25, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Why do most Millenials have children out of wedlock? Oddly, the researchers never seem to consider the answers from “Real World Divorce,” or ponder what decades of real-world divorce observation may have done to most people currently of reproductive age.

* “‘The Concubine Culture Is Alive and Well:’ Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s new novel exposes the glittering compromises of the ‘sarong party girl.’ Amazon link straight to the book is here, sounds interesting but not for me.

* One political / cultural / legal reason cops are ultra-violent. It also goes well with “How police unions actually hurt police officers.”

* “This $99 accessory turns your phone into a laptop,” things I had never really imagined and yet could be very helpful for many people. The more powerful phones get and the more capacious their batteries, the more impressive / useful this becomes. Here is their Kickstarter.

* Similar to the above, “Why I left my new MacBook for a $250 Chromebook.” I’d have trouble without Devonthink Pro, which is the killer app for me. Still, Apple’s recent moves have me watching the Linux laptop market, because I’m not sure OS X will remain usable, good, and supported forever.

* “Can a Nurse Practitioner Replace a Physician? Data and personal experience suggests it’s possible. The current shortage of doctors attending veterans might make it necessary.” That last sentence is the key. See also my 2012 essay, “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* “Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor: Culture and law conspire to make prosecutors hostile to constitutional rights.” Disturbing and important.

Briefly Noted: Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything — Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

July 24, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , Leave a comment

The book is charming and I’m glad I finished, but keep your expectations low. It never proves the assertion in its subtitle and has way too many sections of limited interest about how Seinfeld fared in this time slot or that one or how it competed with forgotten shows (What is Mad About You? again?). Don’t stop reading after the first five pages, which are oddly weak.

seinfeldiaStill, as a case study in creative organization and the risks of not taking risks it’s good. Jerry Seinfeld’s interest in comedy also extends deeply into the past (in college he “wrote a forty-page paper” on comics’ approaches and in his own practice he “tape-recorded his routines, then analyzed them to improve by the next night”). The practice of practice is still underrated. Armstrong writes that when Seinfeld was getting started, “NBC was finishing up its fifth season in first place among the four major networks. It could afford to gamble.” But every non-monopoly organization must gamble: If the last-place network is not doing well, it too must gamble on trying something different if it has already failed at doing the same thing. The worst gamble in virtually every domain except legalized gambling is not gambling.

The NBC line seems like a throwaway, and I wonder if Armstrong did not fully think about its implications and what it means. If she didn’t, that’s okay; neither did the TV executives who wanted to copy Seinfeld’s success without recognizing what went into it:

When [writer] Mehlman went out into the “real world” beyond Seinfeld’s office walls, he found that everyone in television wanted “the next Seinfeld, but they didn’t want to take any of the chances necessary to make such a thing.” They wanted Seinfeld money, but they seemed to resent Seinfeld itself for breaking the rules of television.

Being truly individual is hard. Real gambles are hard. The rhetoric of risk is more attractive than the practice of it. That’s why so many works exhort risk and individuality (like Zero to One) relative to people actually practicing it. I don’t exclude myself from this analysis.

Oh, and one other vital point about organizations: they suffer when their constituent parts seek status more than they do the things they need to do. Larry David eventually left Seinfeld. During the ninth season, “The writers were working most of their waking hours and jostling for power; Seinfeld was writing, producing, and starring; and the main cast members just barely got what they felt they deserved to be paid.” That phrase, “jostling for power” is key. It seems a symptom of organizations past their peak. Facebook tries to minimize office politics. Microsoft brutally encouraged it for many years via its ill-conceived “stack rank” system.

What people do around you matters. Peter Mehlman, Seinfeld’s most important writer apart from Seinfeld himself and Larry David, “moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1989 for a change of scenery,” and “he thought he should take a shot at scriptwriting, since everyone around him was doing it.” There is a propensity to do what everyone around you do does. If you’re in San Francisco you do startups. If you’re caught up among book people you write books. If you’re in L.A. and you write, you write scripts. This implies that you should choose your environment and peer group with greater care than many people (including me) do. People and place exert more influence than we commonly want to imagine. You are not a monad.

Most of the Seinfeld principals justifiably disliked L.A. For Jason Alexander, “In L.A., a veneer of fake niceness covered everything, and it drove him crazy.” By the end of the show, Seinfeld says that he’s “had enough of Los Angeles” and that “I always say that Los Angeles is like Vegas, except the losers stay in town.”

People not intimately familiar Seinfeld should skip Seinfeldia. I wonder if we’ll get a similar treatment for Friends, since, allegedly, Friends is the 20-year-old show that 20-somethings love, according to the possibly bogus trend piece “Is ‘Friends’ Still the Most Popular Show on TV? Why so many 20-somethings want to stream a 20-year-old sitcom about a bunch of 20-somethings sitting around in a coffee shop.” As with most “What those darn kids are up to these days?” stories, it’s difficult or impossible to gauge its accuracy. Still, the appearance of streaming services “compresses” the historical timeline of TV and movies by making many more shows and movies available easily than was the case.

There are jokes, as you’d expect, like “Larry David was what’s known as a comic’s comic, an acquired taste, ‘which means I sucked,’ he often said.” But being funny, even about a funny show, is hard. That’s why Jerry Seinfeld spends his life studying funny.

Here is a decent interview with Armstrong.