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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream — Tyler Cowen

March 16, 2017 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , 3 Comments

The Complacent Class came out last week and it’s excellent. Drop everything and read it. That said, if you read Cowen’s previous two books on related subjects, The Great Stagnation and Average is Over, you will recognize some of the underlying facts that drive the narrative (the preceding links go to my previous essays on those two books).

I’m not going to summarize The Complacent Class because it’s already been well-summarized in many places, like “Dreaming small: how America lost its taste for risk” (though you may not be able to cross the FT paywall). This piece is also good. Here is another. Here is another. More may be found.

That being said, the summaries don’t and can’t account for the many, many small details and sometimes counterintuitive swoops the book makes, and some of the articles I’ve seen argue with strawmen. So I’m going to discuss some of the smaller details and possible counterexamples while attempting to avoid fights with inanimate bags of straw.

Cowen enumerates the many ways our desire for safety actually increases risk, but I can think of one macro trend that defies this general point. For all the complacency of the complacent classes, guns are one domain that remains wildly dangerous. Politicians are reluctant to touch anything to do with guns; by at least some measures, gun laws are more lax than ever and it’s easier than ever for anyone, including mentally ill or deranged people, to get guns. Guns kill tens of thousands of people a year; among non-medical issues, only cars rival them (and opioids, if one considers them non-medical). Yet the collective response has been to make guns easier to get, rather than less. We’re over-obsessed with safety in some domains and seemingly under-obsessed in others, including cars and guns.

In the chapter “Why Americans Stopped Creating” Cowen writes:

A recent report by Wells Fargo showed productivity slowdowns in almost every sector of the American economy. Perhaps most strikingly, the sector “professional and technical services” showed no increase in the productivity of the average office worker at all. You might think IT and the wired office has boosted productivity substantially, and it has in some ways, such as enabling rapid-fire communications across great distances or after work hours are over. But the evidence has yet to materialize for any kind of recent boost in office productivity. We don’t yet know why this is, but maybe the time Americans waste on Facebook and texting and social media takes back some of the gains from all that added connectivity and greater ability to network.

This is plausible, and I’ll add that it may not only be that we’re wasting time “on Facebook and texting and social media.” We may also be deploying technological gains in efficiency terms to create more onerous, bureaucratic, or difficult processes that don’t necessarily add value. In 2015, I wrote a post on “How Computers Have Made Grant Writing Worse.” Computers have enabled us to produce more drafts for clients; clients to comment more on each draft; and, perhaps worst of all, funders to produce longer, harder-to-understand RFPs.

Funders can also just become more demanding in general. When I started working for Seliger + Associates, most foundation and corporate funders wanted a one-, three, or five-page letter proposal, and writing one such proposal was enough to ensure that it could be cleanly and quickly customized for each funder. Many funders are moving to online systems that are hard to use and that often demand persnickety, weird answers to non-standard questions. Our productivity has fallen in some ways, because funders can demand more onerous application processes—which may be attractive to them while raising costs to nonprofit and public agencies.

Email may be another example of technology slowing things down by almost as much as it speeds things up. While email can be very useful often it isn’t, which many of us know as we check it compulsively anyway. In addition to grant writing I do some work as an adjunct professor; I get lots of emails from students, very few of them substantive and most about material covered by the syllabus or about persnickety issues that are best struggled with (the word “persnickety” is useful in dealing with technological availability). I don’t want to turn this into an ill-advised kids-these-days rant, but I’m definitely not convinced that email has improved teaching, learning, or the university experience.

The email bombardment is significant enough that I’ve instead banned email, in part using the rationale at the link, and the results have been good. But not everyone can ban email and it’s still hard for me to separate the substantive from the substanceless. Still, I don’t think being able to receive student emails about sicknesses and petty points around assignments and so forth has improved the education process. Students used to have to wrestle with more problems for themselves, while today they can and do often email questions and concerns that they ought to be able to decide autonomously.

The ways computers have made us more productive are obvious; it’s much faster to write a proposal via computer than typewriter, and it’s more pleasant writing on a 27″ iMac than the 10″ IBM CRT my Dad bought when he started Seliger + Associates. Yet the ways we’ve clawed back gains, through a kind of information Jevons Paradox, are also on my mind. Books like Deep Work take on special salience. How many of you are reading as many books as you used to? I don’t: I do read a lot more longform articles and essays, using Instapaper.com and a Kindle, and while this may be a net improvement I wonder about the costs.

Earlier I mentioned opioids. Cowen writes about what our drugs may say about us:

The 1960s was also an era that called for greater freedom with drug experimentation. But of all the drugs that might have been legalized, American citizens chose the one—marijuana—that makes users spacey, calm, and sleepy. LSD attracted great interest in the 1960s for its ability—for better or worse—to help users see and experience an entirely different world, often with different physical laws. That is now out of fashion.

That point is well-taken, especially regarding marijuana legalization, yet we’ve also seen the growth of molly / ecstasy / MDMA-style uppers that make people better able to connect with each other and that seem most often used in shared, group spaces far from computers. Ayahuasca is popular (or trendy) enough to merit a New Yorker article, “The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale.” I’m not sure molly helps people imagine a different world, like LSD does, but it’s far from the spacey, calming effects of marijuana.

We also all live in our own bubbles, but I’ve been offered that class of drug more often probably than any other. Or maybe people today want to be different enough to be interesting but not so different as to be dangerous; the molly class of drugs, if synthesized in pure form, seems much less dangerous than, say, coke (back to The Complacent Class: “Crack cocaine, a major drug in the 1980s, can rile people up, but for a few decades now it’s been losing ground to heroin and other opioids…”). I don’t have good data on the molly class of drugs and their popularity, and I’d be curious to see if any readers do.

On transport Cowen writes:

The more general picture on transportation can be described with two words: less and slower. The number of bus routes has decreased, and America has done very little to build up its train network, even when additional or faster train lines would be profitable. Although American cities have growing populations and wealth, they haven’t built many new subway systems in the last thirty-five years, with the exception of the partial system in Los Angeles. The Department of Transportation has written, “All indicators show declines in personal travel for every age group, particularly among young people since the early 2000s.”

To me the problems are obvious: traffic is horrendous in many cities; parking is horrendous; plane travel is a relentless horror show, especially given the relentless security theater encountered in airports. For the last six months I’ve been meaning to visit L.A., but I despise going through airports and dealing with the unaccountable TSA goons who man them—and, speaking of subways, there’s no subway from LAX to the rest of the system.

To Seattle’s slight credit, it is (too slowly) building a subway system, which works well so far. Over the next 25 years, it will expand dramatically, but there is no planned route across the 520 floating bridge—people familiar with Seattle will know this is a huge problem. There is progress, but too little, and while Seattle is doing better on housing affordability than San Francisco and some other cities, it isn’t doing as well as it could and should.

Still, in some ways maybe driving less is getting closer to a green energy utopia: we don’t have to drive as much as we once did. In an era of climate change, cell phones, Netflix, and Internet porn may help us avoid or alleviate some of the challenges that arise from the oil economy.

The Complacent Class’s humor is real, underrated, and mostly unnoticed by the commenters I’ve noticed. For example: “There are dating or sex services to find people of specific nationalities, religions, ages, breast sizes, preferred sexual practices, and various weight sizes, including for those who prefer the very obese. Facebook helps people hook up with their exes and their junior high school crushes—not always for the better, of course.” An understatement: one can imagine that junior high crushes are best left in the imaginary past than the somewhat cruel light of the present.

In addition, part of the book’s overall and grimly focused humor comes from the way members of the complacent class (like me) are the people most likely to be reading it and discussing it.

This is an unfair criticism and mostly about my personal preference, but I would’ve liked to see more about books. The comment about Jane Austen being the canonical canonical writer of today, given her interest in matching, versus Dostoyevsky being the canonical canonical writer of the ’60s, being obsessed with morals, murder, and ethics, is good, and I wanted more. Is Gone Girl a fantasy about complacency shattered? Is Seveneves another way of yearning for complacency’s end? Is the seeming end of high culture itself a form of complacency?

I haven’t written much about the chapter on matching, which is interesting throughout, and the chapter “How a Dynamic Society Looks and Feels” is especially good. The last chapter is more speculative, and one wonders what “The Return of Chaos” might mean, beyond current political problems. Still, it’s striking to me that we barely avoided a global catastrophe in the form of Ebola. But I do think we’ve become collectively unaware of how bad, bad can really be. I wrote some about those issues in “Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse,” especially regarding how it’s possible to sleepwalk into war. Many of the things done by Trump so far are bad but not catastrophic. Some catastrophic things may yet come to pass through his action, inaction, or simple incompetence, and we will all bear its costs. Everything, including complacency, has a cost.

Briefly noted: Sweetbitter — Stephanie Danler

July 18, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Fiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

You may have read about Sweetbitter, which is a resolutely okay novel that you should not even consider unless you’ve already read and liked Kitchen Confidential and Love Me Back, both of which cover kitchen and restaurant stories (from page 9 of Sweetbitter: “When I got there they told me a lot of stories” about restaurants, Union Square, and New York). Like many New York novels, it has a masturbatory, self-important, and inward-gazing feel. Many of New York’s structural problems can be traced back to Matt Yglesias’s excellent book The Rent Is Too Damn High, but of course none of the characters in literary fiction ever read or know anything beyond what they themselves immediately experience.

sweetbitterYou will find many ridiculous lines like, “in New York City there are absolutely no rules.” The sort of lines that, spoken on a reality TV show, the literati would condescend to, justifiably, but here, in this package, it’s literature, or the sort of novel that makes literary moves. Maybe I’m unfair and the things that are profound or profound-seeming at 22 are different than the things that are profound or profound-seeming later. But there is too much, “Do you know what it means to be a server?” too much concern about “totems of who I was.”

There is also oddly little sex in a novel with too little else to recommend it. The protagonist, Tess, chases her own personal Mr. Big (although his name is appealingly Jake), and the results can either be predictable or more fairy tale than gritty realism.

I didn’t consciously realize until reading this novel and talking to a friend in the restaurant industry that the industry only really works for its employees if or when the employees get pre-tax food subsidies from other restaurants. Let me explain. Many mid- and high-end restaurant workers have an implicit or explicit deal you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours in which they give other “industry” people free food / booze, the value of which can probably add up to thousands of dollars a year, all of it untaxed. Since restaurant industry profits are notoriously low (some estimates are as low as 1 – 4%), some of the pay that would otherwise need to go to servers who’d get taxed on that pay instead goes to them in the form of food. And they expect that favor returned: On Monday you go to Joe’s restaurant, and on Tuesday people from Joe’s go to yours.

Still, it’s not worth reading the novel for that insight. It’s dubiously worth reading a novel with disconnected ejaculations like this all over the page:

“Appetite is not a symptom,” Simone said when I complained of being hungry. “It cannot be cured. It’s a state of being, and like most, has its attendant moral consequences.”

Okay, that’s deep, but so what?

There are good sentences, but they don’t add up to much. I neither regretted finishing nor skimming the second half. When people complain about “MFA fiction,” Sweetbitter is what they’re talking about. I’ll read the next thing Danler writes.

The Voyeur’s Motel — Gay Talese

July 13, 2016 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

The real lesson of The Voyeur’s Motel is not how depraved most people are, but rather how boring they are. In the story, Gerald Foos gets his start as a teenage voyeur by watching his aunt Katheryn “for five or six years,” and while she spent much time nude most of that time was spent “at her dressing table arranging her collection of porcelain miniature dolls from Germany, or her valuable collection of thimbles.” Who knew there even was or is such thing as a “valuable collection of thimbles?”

voyeursmotelMost of the people Foos observes over decades in his hotel are little more interesting; the epigraph to The Voyeur’s Motel could be that famous quote from Walden, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Except that most of the individuals and couples Foos observes seem not to know enough to even feel desperation. Instead, to the extent they have or show feelings, they seem to be consumed with petty bickering and bullshit. The number who are luminously full seem small.

Consider the preceding two paragraphs in light of complaints about smart phones and laptops and the Internet relentlessly distracting us, or Internet dating making us flightier or more demanding of partners or more likely to break up. Maybe smartphone distraction is a big improvement on what on preceded it, on arranging porcelain miniature dolls or thimbles. In 1980 Talese goes into the attic and spies on people staying in the hotel:

As I looked through the slats, I saw mostly unhappy people watching television, complaining about minor physical ailments to one another, making unhappy references to the jobs they had, and constant complaints about money and the lack of it, the usual stuff that people say every day to one another, if they’re married or otherwise in cohabitation, but is never reported upon or thought about much beyond the one-on-one relationship. To me, without the Voyeur’s charged anticipation of erotic activity, it was tedium without end, the kind acted out in a motel room by normal couples every day of the year, for eternity.

The things that people consider to be pleasures are also sometimes odd, as Foos says:

My observations indicate that the majority of vacationers spend their time in misery. They fight about money; where to visit; where to eat; where to stay; all their aggressions are somehow immeasurably increased, and this is the time they discover they are not properly matched [. . .] Vacations produce all the anxieties within mankind to come forward during this time, and to perpetuate the worst of emotions.

That’s been my experience, and I wonder if people do them anyway to say they’ve done them, or imagine the best parts of them. Maybe many of us would be better off if, as Rebecca Shuman suggests, more people took her advice in “Alone, Together: To avoid travel stress and major arguments, more couples should vacation together but fly alone.”

Is it real? Hard to say. Talese notes:

Indeed, over the decades since we met, in 1980, I had noticed various inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his Voyeur’s Journal are dated 1966,m but the deed of sale for the Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office, shows that he purchased the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don’t quite scan.

“Don’t quite scan” may be an understatement. On June 30, Talese actually “disavowed” The Voyeur’s Motel:

Talese overlooked a key fact in his book: Foos sold the motel, located in Aurora, Colo., in 1980 and didn’t reacquire it until eight years later, according to local property records. His absence from the motel raises doubt about some of the things Foos told Talese he saw.

Still: Talese did see the hotel. He later walked back his disavowal. I’m a great believer in the power of fiction and the power of people to make shit up, but even by that standard making up the shit that Foos writes seems unlikely. I guess it to be more real than not real. It seems likely that no one will know.

Given the volume of material, The Voyeur’s Motel is oddly short. This long New Yorker article gives you much of the content and flavor. Still, do not listen to the negative reviews so far, which have mostly been uselessly negative and/or focused on the perceived ethics of the book; almost all of those articles about mostly about the author’s need to perform signaling and status functions, rather than the book itself.

As with Thy Neighbor’s Wife, people expecting nonstop prurience will be disappointed. In some ways the book can productively be read in conjunction with The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, since Goffman’s book is about the social, public self and Talese’s book is about the private, supposedly unobserved and sexual self. To me and, I suspect, many readers and writers of novels the latter is more interesting and less likely to be foreseen.

The Voyeur’s Motel comes back over and over again to the need to reliever torpor. The first quotes are from the start of the book; around the midpoint we get this:

Ordinary life is boring, [Foos] concluded, not for the first time; no wonder that is always a big market for make believe: staged dramas, films, works of fiction, and also the legalized mayhem inherent in sports…

That most people do not try harder to alleviate boredom is an unsolved problem—perhaps most people don’t perceive boredom as Foos does, or they feel powerless, or both. Foos’ second wife is not immune. After retirement, she “devoted much of her free time to alphabetizing his millions of sports cards.” The sports cards are Foos’ thimbles.

Briefly noted: Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley – Antonio Garcia Martinez

July 11, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction Tags: , , Leave a comment

Chaos Monkeys is supposed to be refreshingly honest but instead feels slimy; it feels like Martinez is ripping off other people’s good will and earnestness, which is deeply unattractive and raises the urge to altruistically punish. Martinez is aware of it enough to cite it but not enough to surmount it:

Cynicism is the last refuge of the shiftless. I don’t cite this absolutist tendency for the cheap sardonic joke, the asshole hipster who’s too cool for school to believe in anything. No, I cite it because I was as seduced as the next guy sitting there in Pong [the Facebook conference room], perhaps even more.

chaos_monkeysExcept that he is a cynic, he reaches for the sardonic joke, he is the asshole hipster, he grabs the clichés. He has much mud to sling, but he ought to also know the problem with mud as a weapon. What kind of person calls out everyone else for being a poseur and faker? It is odd to read about “a man [who] oozed an off-putting smarminess” in a book about a man who oozed an off-putting smarminess.

The sentence-by-sentence is okay and the content is often interesting. There are details of the ad world I didn’t know about and details about the startup world most people won’t know about. Then there are parts so conceptually and linguistically confused and muddled that I want to take back compliments like “okay” and “interesting:”

This was the major-league, serious shit, take-on-prisoners championship of thee tech entrepreneurship, and if you were going to play, you’d better show up ready to bite the ass off of a bear.

So the sentence moves from sports, to abstraction mixed with the scatological, to warfare, back to sports, to companies, to sports, and then to nonsense. It sort of works as long as you don’t pay too much attention. Chaos Monkeys rewards inattention. But you can’t get away from tone, which wafts through the book like a foul odor from a superficially attractive person. I don’t want to snark at others; I want to know, and Martinez makes snark seem like knowing, which may bedazzle or bamboozle the young or unwary but should put off the people who are building the future, not just manipulating social status symbols.

Like so many stories, the book is also about the madness of coastal real estate markets; in one year Martinez makes a million dollars, which in San Francisco feels justifiably middle-class due to outrageous land-use restrictions that drive up the price of housing and income taxes. I live in New York, which is afflicted with similarly maddening maladies that some subset of voters nonetheless likes.

Sections of the book are inadvertently revealing, which describe problems with the higher education system and the signaling madness that has overtaken it:

it would be my Facebook stock vesting yet to come that would pay for private high schools and Stanford, so Zoë and Noah wouldn’t have to sneak into this country’s elite through the back door from the cattle class, as I had to do.

Ignore even the extraneous “do” at the end of that sentence, as it should’ve been edited out. So much is wrong with that sentence and the mind behind it that my own mind boggles. Let me ignore most of it and I wonder if Zoë and Noah would prefer $300,000 in cash at age 22 rather than private high schools and Stanford. I know I would!

By far the worst part about Chaos Monkeys is that it’s an okay book within which there’s a great book—written perhaps by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s books reward attention. The more attention you give Chaos Monkeys, the more its weaknesses show.

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships — Neil Strauss

July 2, 2016 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

The Truth is poorly named but it’s also amazing and you should read it, preferably in the biblical, imitation-leather edition. Unfortunately, The Truth buries the lede: the weakest, most tedious section by far is the beginning, when Strauss goes to therapy for “sex addiction” (which may not exist, at least for reasonable definitions of “exist”).* Don’t give up. Get past the first third and pay special attention to the rest, where Strauss’s sharp, comedic / absurdist observations strike.

the_truthIn the first section, we learn that there is such a thing as “a CSAT,” that is, “a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist.” The therapists seem at least as mad as the patients, which seems to be a recurring theme in life (you know what they say about psych majors…). The treatment does not work, at least at first. Strauss, seeking answers, gets what appears to be an fMRI, hoping that his brain makes hedonic and novelty-seeking, only to be told that he chooses relationships or the chase. Score one for free will or something like it.

The middle section is about the chase. The chase is about women, yes, but it’s also about finding a way to be. Strauss meets people whose new-age and pseudo-religious or -mystical bullshit is vile. At one moment, meeting a woman who presents herself as a guru, “Common sense tells me to leave; curiosity drives me forward.” That’s the writer coming out. I wish I could say that I always follow common sense. I don’t, for the same reason. Strauss’s Guru attempts “mix spirituality with business” and then says, “Let me know if you have any ET experiences in Peru.”

He doesn’t. He runs.

Unfortunately he runs to a polyamory retreat that’s also infused with spirituality nonsense that should’ve died with the ’70s. That doesn’t work out either:

I look up and see a yoga stud from Kamala’s pod.

“Have you rounded up any more girls?” the orbiter asks him.

Kamala Devi and Shama Helena said polyamory was about loving relationships, not casual sex. But these guys seem more like next-level pickup artists, coming to these conferences with the intention of sucking any available women into their powerful reality.

Understanding things as they are, as opposed to how they “seem,” is rarely easy for anyone, anywhere—which may be one reason we have literature. The supposedly selfless caring for others that Strauss hears about is more like socialism, with its attendant problems: Equality for you and special privileges for me.

Later, things do not improve for Strauss: “This is truly the blackest day of my life: I’ve been kicked out of an orgy for eating popcorn.” He’s eating popcorn because he can’t fake bogosity at the level necessary for that world.

So he tries another (there are more worlds out there than most of us know). His next stop involves something like conventional swingers, if that phrase isn’t an oxymoron, at a club or party called Bliss. Towards the height of his first experience, he writes that “I would’ve paid every penny in the bank for this experience ten years ago—If I’d known it was even possible.” Many things are possible, but the mind holds us back; the same theme in a different context plays out repeatedly in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. For Strauss, that moment is “the closest thing to heaven I’ve ever experienced.”

Then he passes out. He’s taken too much GHB.

So, in short, Strauss attends an orgy that should be everything he’s ever wanted, but he takes drugs he shouldn’t and doesn’t have the sex he should, or that he thinks he wants. While there, he meets a woman who seems mostly like a groupie but who also demands monogamy and yet goes to an orgy, chiefly because her “friend” is there (that people are not internally consistent or even interested in internal consistency could be a shadow theme of The Truth—or maybe it’s just been written by an “ambivalent,” as Strauss is, or is termed).

He goes to another and decides he is “determined not to wreck this orgy like all the others.” I won’t speak to what happens, but one does get the sense that Strauss is well attuned to self-criticism and understanding how others will see him.

Wanting to be a swinger or polyamorous person can make internal, logical, and consistent sense; one cannot say the same for what comes next, when Strauss, on his own, sticks three straight women in the same domicile and attempts to date all of them, simultaneously, while living with them. The preceding sentence’s length and complexity is deliberately designed to evoke the complexity of Strauss’s arrangement.

In sports there is a term called “unforced errors,” which occur when a player does something transparently wrong that is not caused by the opponent or some other outside force. What Strauss attempts is an unforced error and one that ought to be easily foreseen. But one might attribute this to that previous mentioned issue between common sense and curiosity. The three women more or less come to Strauss, in his telling. Mastering “the game” has evidently done things for him.

In The Truth Strauss ultimately assigns the genesis of his adult relationship habits to his upbringing. In his case maybe that’s true, but I’m reluctant to assume a casual relationship between upbringing and adult life: how many people who had childhoods similar to his grew up to be functional adults? Since at least the time of Freud it’s been popular to ascribe adult personality traits to childhood, but I’m not convinced those are robustly supported and that they’re more than just-so stories we tell ourselves to make sense of a deeply chaotic, multi-faceted world.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular are deeply troubled fields because we don’t have good models for the brain. In those domains it may be obvious when someone is too dysfunctional to live independently, but the supposed treatments and models are derived from poor or nonexistent premises. Imagine trying to start a car and discovering that one third of the time it starts, one third it doesn’t nothing, and another third of the time the engine dies. That’s close to the current state of real knowledge about psychiatry and psychology.

We tell ourselves stories, which is great—in some ways I am a professional storyteller—but we use science to figure out what’s reliably and consistently true, and the childhood traumas leading to adult reenactments does not appear to be reliably and consistently true. Perhaps the stories Strauss tells himself now allow him to live in a particular and better way, and in that sense they’re functional. But they may not be causal.

On page 10 of The Truth Strauss writes of his then-girlfriend and now-wife, “She is reliving her mother’s relationship with her cheating father. I am reliving my father’s secret sex life. We are repeating a pattern handed down by generations of lying, cheating assholes and the poor fools who trust them.” They specifically seem to be repeating generational trauma. The idea that we repeat our childhood experiences has been commonplace since Freud, but is it true? Do we really have any evidence of it, or, again, are we just telling ourselves stories? Pop culture loves Freudian ideas. I’m not so sure that the psychosexual narrative Strauss constructs is more real than one that accepts the null hypothesis.

By the end Strauss is married. I wonder how Strauss’s marriage will hold up over time. I wouldn’t bet on “well” without favorable odds. Many beliefs that feel firm at a given moment turn out to be provisional in the fullness of time. It’s striking that Strauss never, so far as I know, mentions his age or the age of his lover, Ingrid.

For all of his problems, I can’t imagine most guys doing what Strauss has done or accomplishing what Strauss has accomplished. For all the psychic trauma in his childhood, the outcome is impressive.

The Truth is the sort of book I can’t imagine being made, in any sort of honest way, into a movie. Oddly, perhaps, I can imagine The Game being made into a reasonably honest movie and am somewhat surprised that it hasn’t been.

The final truth about relationships is that there is no final, universal truth about relationships. We make things up as we go along and universal experiences aren’t universal. It’s not a real sexy truth. It also doesn’t require a book to say. Instead, we tell all our stories about relationships in the book of life and the stories we draw from it.**

Let us return to the beginning of The Truth again. Strauss starts by saying he is “the king of ambivalence.” He wants what he can’t have or doesn’t have at that moment. This is not good and is perhaps generalizable:

Most married people I know don’t seem to be any happier. One day Orlando Bloom, an actor I’d written a Rolling Stone article about, came over to visit. At the time he was married to one of the world’s most successful and beautiful women, Victoria’s Secret supermodel Miranda Kerr [. . .] And one of the first things out of his mouth? “I don’t know if marriage is worth it. I don’t know why anyone does it. I mean, I want romance and I want to be with someone, but I just don’t think it works.”

My other married friends haven’t fared much better.

Yet he does it anyway. To his credit, Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity does eventually get name-checked, since Perel has done unusual work in questioning our usual arrangements. Still. On the first page Strauss considers a woman and writes a sentence that could be an alternate title: “Not my type, but I would.” The book processes his motion from “but I would” to “but I won’t,” even if she is his type (and it seems that most women are).

* Psychiatry and psychology in general aren’t in good epistemological shape. There is no good functional, reproducible model of the brain. Both fields may essentially be wielding beads and rattles rather than science and be closer to shamanism than medicine.

** This is a post I’ve meant to write for a long time, but it hasn’t been an easy write.

Briefly noted: Leviathan Wakes — James S. A. Corey

April 28, 2016 By in Books, Fiction, Reviews, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Leviathan Wakes is defiantly, definitely okay; the biggest problem with it isn’t the novel itself but having already read Blindsight, which its some similar notes but is just a much, much better novel.

Leviathan Wakes is big on game theory, empathy, and political questions. They start early—”The temptation to have an unexplained comm failure, erase the logs, and let the great god Darwin have his way was always there” happens on page 14—and don’t really relent. Still, I dislike the implication that “the great god Darwin” thinks that individuals and small groups are inwardly selfish; evolution has also endowed us with the ability to cooperate, and humans are super-cooperators, alone among animals.

Leviathan_WakesBut the divisions among people may change shape and form, but they always remain, at least as long as we live in a world of economic scarcity. In Leviathan Wakes, Earthers, Martians, and Belters (those who grow up and/or live in the Asteroid Belt) are the primary divisions. I write this in 2016, and in the current European and American political systems there are spasms around divisions that, viewed from the proper perspective, will seem trivial. The other day I heard someone say that Trump has a point about immigrants. I agreed and amplified, suggesting that he do something about the filthy, lazy Irish and Italians, with their Papist ways and mooching dispositions. The guy I was talking to didn’t know what to do with that; the Know Nothing Party may be gone, but its ideas live on for as long as humans have a powerful psychological need to divide ourselves into tribes.

In Leviathan Wakes some descriptions are good (on a space station, “The air smelled beery with old protein yeast and mushrooms” or “The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve”), but the text can usually be described as nondescript. It’s rarely bad but rarely stellar. For example, the sentence after the one about the circle of life on Ceres is “He liked it that way,” which is representative of the novel’s language.

The sense of mystery is strong, though, and mostly excuses the sentences. You’ve read worse. You’ve read better. The plot gets sillier as the novel progresses.

What else? There is a convenient magic drive that gets people from place to place relatively rapidly. It’s hard to imagine that genetic engineering won’t have re-made the human species by the time we develop advanced space stations with room for millions of people. Did people in 1750 imagine that in 2000 we’d still be riding horses and firing muskets? Because imagining 2250 without substantial genetic engineering is hard (unless there’s an apocalypse in the meantime, which is also possible).

Leviathan Wakes is guilty of many of Charlie Stross’s space opera clichés, but I mostly forgive it. I just can’t imagine wanting to re-read it.

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals — John Lefevre

April 17, 2016 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Masters of one medium, like Twitter, aren’t necessarily masters of another medium, like the 80,000-word memoir. They can be but don’t have to be. Lefevre mastered Twitter, but his long-form game is not as strong. That being said I did laugh when reading Straight To Hell; I feel like I couldn’t drink anywhere near the amount Lefevre does, or take anywhere near the amount of drugs. I don’t imagine I’d want to be friends with him. As he puts his life philosophy, “As we see it, if you’re dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don’t belong on Wall Street.”* That sounds like a sentence from a Bernie Sanders rally. It isn’t.

Straight_To_HellLeFevre writes, “From my experience, the rich and unscrupulous tend to make for entertaining company.” Speaking of political connections, he could be talking about Donald Trump, which is part of the reason he makes a popular, evil presidential candidates (and I don’t use the word “evil” lightly, but he is evil: the evil of pure id, untempered by knowledge or self-awareness). Straight to Hell has more political resonances than it should, and that may help explain its popularity, as it works on readers’ subconscious.

Still, LeFevre’s company is often entertaining, and the best one can say about his scruples is that he makes public what many would like to be private. The speaker of unpleasant truths has a kind of honor. The book is his unpleasant truths, though it is often about the unpleasant truths he dodged (“Now I know for sure, this deal is never going to work. But I still don’t want to be the one who gets blamed for killing it.”) Machiavelli has a vital role in history for a reason.

Even for people like me, who don’t see money as evil, LeFevre will make them want to see money as evil. (Consider how Sylvia Nasar puts it in Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius: “Historically, money had been seen as powerful, desirable, very likely evil, and mysterious, like natural calamities or epidemics.”) Money can be earned in ways that tend to benefit humanity or, in LeFevre’s world, in ways that tend to be about rent seeking and stealing pieces of the pie, rather than earning them, or expanding the size of the pie. Finance here looks like the latter part. That being said one doesn’t and maybe can’t know whether LeFevre’s book is representative, any more than a movie like Bad Teacher is representative of the teaching industry.

Straight To Hell is a memoir about signaling. The finance world presented in it has descended to an almost-pure signaling hell, in which there is no content, only surface. Hence the ceaseless references to luxury brands and luxury-brand schools. The two have become synonymous, however much humanities-department Marxists may want to deny it. There is a weird kinship between high school memoirs or novels and Straight To Hell. American high schools are painful because there is no content to shape form. Lefevre’s finance world is similar. In it, seniority beats skill (count the number of times the word “senior” appears). Many American high schools are so bad because there is no financially viable way to start an alternative high school that can siphon off smarter students and parents. Banks, in Straight To Hell, operate the same way. If contemporary investment banks operate anything like the way Lefevre depicts them operating, then “fin tech” (or “financial technology companies and products,” to use a phrase du jour) should be a ripe opportunity for startups, because the banks, and their personnel and culture, are so internally fucked up that smart startups ought to be able to eat them.

Unless, of course, regulatory and other barriers kill startups before the startups can really succeed. Still, anyone investing in financial companies should read Straight to Hell. It ought to give them courage, if it’s accurate. I can’t really judge whether it is. I’m too far from the industry. It seems unlikely, but unlikely things turn out to be true all the time. It seemed unlikely that the U.S. government would massively spy on virtually all of its citizens, but Snowden showed that it does. It seemed unlikely that an electric car startup could succeed, but Tesla showed that it can. I won’t discount Straight to Hell without trying to triangulate its portrayals. Still, if it is to be believed then many bankers are redistributing money to escorts and drug dealers. Not that I’m opposed, necessarily, to either group, but it is interesting given recent noise about financial inequality to see money flow from the rich to middle-skill service providers (though the book is not conceptualized or framed in that way; still, often the most interesting parts of a book are those that are unintended).

One could write an interesting piece comparing temperaments in Houellebecq and LeFevre. One could also write an interesting piece comparing Thiel in Zero to One and LeFevre. As Thiel notes, in a discussion about why startups (and other companies) must incentivize their employees with stock and other methods that align incentives:

Cash is attractive. It offers pure optionality: once you get your paycheck, you can do anything you want with it. [. . .] A cash bonus is slightly better than a cash salary—at least it’s contingent on a job well done. But even so-called incentive pay encourages short-term thinking and value grabbing. Any kind of cash is more about the present than the future.

zero to oneStraight to Hell can be seen as a document about “value grabbing” and about living in the hedonistic present. The value grabbing is not purely financial, either: It’s also sexual. The team lives or dies by the current roadshow. Slickness rules. One could also compare Straight to Hell and Zero to One in terms of humor versus earnestness. Zero to One has its moments of humor (think of the brief section comparing hipsters to the Unabomber, or the part about Richard Branson and the naked windsurfing model) but the preponderance of the book is about how to make serious, real improvements in the quality of life for all humans. Straight to Hell is about getting a bonus and getting your dick wet (concern over women’s pleasure is mostly absent, or I’d add something appropriate for women as well). There is nothing intrinsically wrong about either and indeed both have concerned me greatly at various points, but there is something distinctly sublunar about the relentlessness of those concerns, and the way one never looks up from the bonus or the girl or the meal.

Is it a satire? Is the joke on me because I don’t get it? There is much like, “There’s no justice in this world—a valuable lesson to learn at a young age, especially if you want to end up on Wall Street.” Is it bravado, trolling, or truth? After many words I still don’t know.

* If they’ll cheat someone else, they’ll cheat you when they get a chance.

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age — Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly

March 13, 2016 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The first chapter of All Things Shining is strong and so is the second, on David Foster Wallace, but the book gets duller as it goes on, sustaining as it does its readings based on other books. There is something curiously empty about it, like a modern art museum that is much duller than a celebrity’s Instagram account. It is too well mannered. Academia’s mores rules. All Things Shining encourages us to find shining meaning in things but it itself doesn’t feel shiningly meaningful, as even sections like Lewis Hyde’s The Gift do.

Deciding that something is boring is easier than fully understanding why something is boring. I haven’t quite figured out the “Why” question regarding All Things Shining. The book does remind one of why great novels endure; story is still powerful and narratives without story are hard to sustain, especially when many claims seem somewhat dubious:

Modern life can seem to be defined by [uncertainty]. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and most of us could admit to finding ourselves at last occasionally wavering. Far from being certain and unhesitating, our lives can at the extreme seem shot through with hesitation and indecision, culminating in choices finally made on the basis of nothing at all.

I said that this is “somewhat dubious” because it is, even if we do face many choices. At bottom we each have to choose for ourselves what is important, and then pursue that thing. It might be pleasure or technology or words or research or money. Universals are likely absent and “The burden of choice is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It proliferates in a world that no longer has any God or gods, nor even any sense of what is sacred and inviolable, to focus on our understanding of what we are.” The “burden of choice” also comes from the fact that many of us can pay the rent and pay for food, which leaves us with more time for self-contemplation. Maybe too much time.

I’m fond of telling students that you know you’re an adult when you realize that, if you can’t pay the rent and pay for food, you won’t have anywhere to live or anything to eat. Sometimes a focus on base material conditions is helpful. And forgetting that a very large number of people are justifiably focused on this issues is sometimes too easy for tenured academics.

Some paragraphs are both useful and yet I wonder what polls would say:

The Greeks of Homer’s era lived intense and meaningful lives, constantly open to being overwhelmed by the shining presence of the Olympian gods. As happy polytheists, their world was the opposite of our contemporary nihilistic age.

Did the average Greek of Homer’s era live intense and meaningful lives? What about their children? What happened when their children died? Or was the average Greek covered in shit (link likely safe for work), slaving away to support a tiny number of nobles who focused on political games, consuming the marginal product of labor of the peasants, and fighting pointless, zero-sum wars with other nobles?

Still, the book has some interesting sections, and it is a deeper discussion of its issues than you’ll find on most of the Internet The discussions of craftsmanship are glancing but perhaps most interesting. Maybe if Wallace had conceptualized himself first as a craftsman and then as an everything else things would have gone better. Maybe not, though, and it’s hard to criticize one of the most truthful writers of his generation for not doing even better than he did.

Man’s search for meaning goes on.

Onwards.

Briefly noted: The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company — Michael S. Malone

March 7, 2016 By in Books, Computers/Apple, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The Intel Trinity is another of these books that one wishes were better written but that remains interesting throughout nonetheless. For one thing, I bought the party line about Intel being essentially indomitable from its inception to the present. It wasn’t (“Frankly, the evidence argues that Intel may have been the most successful technology company ever founded by a dysfunctional start-up team—certainly by such a team that stayed together”). The book also injects ideas about history and legacy into a very contemporary culture:

Thanks to the amnesia of Silicon Valley and the digital world, [Robert Noyce] had almost been forgotten by each subsequent generation of techies as they elbowed their way to fame at a thousand dot-com companies, and then at Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Intel_TrinityOver time, “Silicon Valley had finally and unexpectedly become history,” at least to its founders. Over a long enough time period anything becomes history, although Alan Kay famously said, “I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. [. . . Computing is] complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture.”

It will take many more books and maybe many more years before it becomes less of a pop culture, if it ever does. The Intel Trinity is history, but the paper quality of the hardcover is oddly poor, as if the publishers themselves imagined the book to be non-essential and disposable. That contrast between the historical comments and the quality of the physical object itself is odd.

Still, it does trace the story of Intel from its beginnings and from the Fairchild exodus. Fairchild employees were apparently more dissolute and fun than modern tech company workers, or at least compared to the image of modern tech workers:

Just to repeat the anecdotes of the era is insufficient. There were endless after-work drunken gatherings at the nearby Wagon Wheel saloon, where women employees were hustled, marriages were broken, feuds were fed, and in time, employees were stolen by competitors.

Intel itself, however, was apparently less exciting, at least for most people.

The Intel Trinity also points to some of the reasons why Silicon Valley has been so hard to dislodge as a startup capitol (much as NYC is still a publishing capitol, despite outrageously high housing costs): “between 1967 and 1973, [hundreds of new companies] created not only a vast and prosperous business-technology community, but also the greatest start-up company incubator the world had ever seen” (59). At a time when most people were focused on free love and the word “start-up” to connote a new company didn’t really exist, northern California was blossoming. That’s a tremendous head start that’s hard to overcome today and will be hard to overcome tomorrow, despite San Francisco’s completely insane politics.

I haven’t yet got to the stories of Noyce, Moore and Grove. The latter has the most flabbergasting story, since he barely escaped World War II-era Hungary, when Hungary first fought on the side of the Germans, then was occupied by Germany, then was occupied by the Soviets, and eventually had its fledgling democracy crushed by the Soviets. Grove was Jewish and his survival story is amazing enough to have made me order his memoir, Swimming Across, which Malone draws from.

One has to wonder why the Intel trinity is less famous than, say, Bill Gates. I think the answer is simple: there were three of them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are less famous than Gates, though their company is at least as important, largely because I think the press needs a single person to deify and to hate. Multiple founders makes the process of adulation and despair harder to conduct. Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most famous modern startup founder because he stands alone in the spotlight. This reading owes something to Zero to One, which is as much about culture and it is about startups. Culture is everywhere, even in technology, as Malone reminds us.

The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch — Jonathan Gottschall

January 14, 2016 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , 2 Comments

How many people are willing to admit: “I concluded that I’d been wrong about MMA people, fighters and fans alike?” Admitting to being wrong is a paradoxical show of power: the power to say that you’re weak, rather than pretending to be strong, which only the strong can do. The Professor in the Cage is full of paradox, beginning maybe with the author himself: a cerebral professor who pursues fighting. I get why he does and why he gets the reactions he does. I don’t do MMA but people are surprised that I run and lift. Are those activities in natural opposition to cerebral writers? To anyone in cerebral professions? Not to me, but, evidently, to many.

prof_in_cageA lot guys start MMA because they fear for their own masculinity and want to prove it: “Football captains and bullies don’t need martial arts. They already know they are strong and tough. Guys turn to martial arts when they fear they are weak.” Or, at least, they do in situations—like most of the contemporary Western world—when their physical safety is mostly assured. Much later, in the final chapters, Gottschall says, “half my reason for taking the fight was to try to do a brave thing—to redeem myself, at least in my own eyes, for all the times I’d flinched when I was young.” There may be other possibilities for redemption. Like, say, letting go.

Or channeling your energy in different directions.

The stories of entrepreneurial competition are legion. Gottscahll puts his energy in physical direction, in part because he’s an English professor by day—and a failing one at that. We have certain things in common, Gottschall and me, except I got out earlier, and I haven’t published the books he has. In some ways, though, Gottschall is a warning: How can someone who has done so much interesting work still get no traction in English departments? He could be a cautionary tale in my own warning essay about grad school.

Towards the end of the book Gottschall writes,

I’ve said I took up fighting partly in hopes of getting fired. But that’s only half-true. Becoming a real college professor has been the great ambition of my adult life, and a big part of me is still reluctant to give up on it. In truth, I probably feared being fired as much as I hoped for it.

He also observes that, contrary to what he thought he should do, he finds that “if you train in MMA, it’s hard to stay in the closet about it.” Which may true of any passion or activity that makes you feel most alive. However much you’re supposed to hide it, it’s hard to suppress that instinct. It’s who you are. It makes you slightly evangelical. For Gottschall, too, he finds himself “on crutches, or limping in a walking boot,” which makes MMA fighting particularly hard to ignore. I sometimes reach for metaphors related to lifting and running because they’re handy and relatively easy to understand. They’re also what I know. All of us have stocks of experience and knowledge and that’s part of what colors, filters, or constructs our world.

At base Gottschall is looking for life. In this respect he is like a novelist. He finds it fighting more, maybe, than fucking (or perhaps another book on that subject is yet to emerge). It may not be a mistake that one of James Wood’s books is The Nearest Thing to Life and it in turn discusses novels. Life and life-feeling are tricky to define yet continually sought. Cooperation and competition are perpetually cooperating and competing with each other. In The Professor and the Cage they are physically embodied. That physical embodiment propels the book forward. I don’t think I’ll spoil the book by saying that its denouement is a 47-second fight. In ritualized fighting the journey is the destination.

We find life in many places. Gottschall finds it in the cage.

Other have written about him. “Survival of the Fittest in the English Department: Jonathan Gottschall tried to save literary studies. Instead he ruined his career” is interesting throughout. Is it a surprise that three of the most interesting academics in and around English—Gottschall, Camille Paglia, and William Deresiewicz—have such a strained relationship with the rest of the discipline? I don’t have their fortitude or seeming indifference to material possessions. Give me a new iMac and a $14 hipster cocktail stat. More importantly, Paglia’s two-decades-long protest has led to near-zero change. The structure of the system impedes change and will at least until tenure goes away. In the meantime, though, there is life in the cage.