2024 By The Books, Q3
Going through the list of books I’ve engaged with this quarter, I’m surprised to find that almost all of them are audiobooks, and only two out of all 14 I’ve read on my kindle. While this allows me to go through many more books than I otherwise would, it also means that the lack of note-taking makes it much harder to say much of substance about them — especially when I write up these little reviews months after actually listening to the book. Anyway! Notes on all 14, spanning economic history, moral philosophy, math and how not to die, are below.
A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark
It’s exciting to see that there are still genuinely Malthusian economists out there, and none of them is as outspoken about it as Greg Clark. I think of Farewell to Alms (a lovely Hemingway reference, but not an accurate description of what the book is about) as one of these books that is almost certainly wrong along a number of dimensions, but will make you think. The classic puzzle is summarized in the famous graph below:
Clearly, something changed rather dramatically after ~1800, but what? There’s no shortage of theories that explain how first the UK, then many other countries went from a basically stagnant economy, where average living standards saw barely any upswings for millennia, to one of exponential growth. Clark’s explanation goes roughly as follows: For most of human history, technological change did not create lasting improvement, as the greater productivity it unleashed was quickly eaten up by a growing population. Changes in population, however, were not spread equally across the entire country: Poorer people were more likely to die from diseases, and richer people had more offspring than the poor. Taken together, this led to strong downward mobility, a process through which (according to Clark) “middle-class values” eventually trickled down and spread. Then, around 1800 or so, we reach a tipping point, when a more and more industrious, low time preference society reaches a productivity rate high enough to allow it to break out of the Malthusian trap. From there on, success begets more success.
Suffice it to say that this thesis is not shared by the majority of economic historians and economists, and there are probably good reasons to believe that it’s false, or at least not the full truth. (My own guess would be that a lot of the heavy lifting is done by a rather superficial reading how traits are passed on genetically.) But suppose for a moment that it gets the basic structure right: How utterly depressing are its implications! There really isn’t much that can be done to improve the lot of those who live in absolute poverty today, and it may in fact be counterproductive to help them, as it would slow down the process of downward social mobility and keep a society closer to the Malthusian frontier. All that is to say: Be warned that a lot of the opposition to the book is based on a reaction to these deterministic implications.
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre
A superb contribution to moral philosophy. I had somehow filed this under “grumpy conservative rant about how the relativists have led us astray”, but it’s so much more than that. The shortest summary I can think of is “context matters!”, in the sense that moral systems devoid of historical and social context, and instead based on abstract, universal principles, — as advocated for by many Enlightenment thinkers and most contemporary moral philosophers - , are doomed to fail. The constructive part of his argument — where virtue ethics is somehow inserted to fill the void — leaves a lot to be desired, but that may just be because a single book obviously cannot provide all the context that would be required to make sense of what virtues are, how to balance them, and what it means to live a virtuous life.
Like it or not, there really isn’t a way around After Virtue in debates about the foundations of moral philosophy. It forces us to come to terms with the fact of persistent and widespread moral disagreement: Instead of attempting to come up with premises we all (or at least all “reasonable people”) can agree on, and deciding collectively on how we evaluate the arguments that can be constructed from them, we may need to think more about narratives that make our actions intelligible. How this would look like in practice in a world as interconnected as ours I’m not sure, but this shouldn’t stop us from trying.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
The remarkable achievement of this book is that it brings to life what is often conveniently packaged as the huddled masses. It is easy to forget — especially when working in a field where everything is a numbers game, and interventions are judged not by how they help any individual person, but by their aggregate effect — that the ultra-poor are not, in fact, preoccupied by nothing besides mere survival. The microcosm of Annawadi — a slum that grew on land technically owned by the Mumbai airport authorities, but in practice lying fallow — is just as multi-faceted, if not more so, than the societies the more fortunate of us inhabit. There is cunning, forging of alliances, conflicts along religious lines, love, hope, corruption and despair, a desire to improve one’s lot but also a strong sense of one’s place in society and what morality demands. Many of its stories are tragic, heart-crushing in fact, with children succumbing to what would presumably be easily preventable diseases, entire families finding themselves jailed on the faintest of evidence, and women self-immolating out of shame and despair. And yet, the slum inhabitants show remarkable resilience that is as inspiring as it is surprising. The writing itself is very matter of fact, not an overly stylized, dramatized account mainly geared towards elucidating the reader’s sympathy, which I liked.
The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch
The title is a little pathetic, and generally speaking I thought it was a little too self-congratulatory — calling yourself “the reality-based community” implies in no uncertain terms that everybody else is deluded, which is of course what every single social or political group is claiming for themselves. Don’t get me wrong, the substance of the book — which is really about strengthening epistemic norms and finding ways to punish transgressors, whether or not they share our political dispositions — seems both right and important, but I do worry that it’s preaching to the choir.
Consciousness and the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene
This is a fantastic book by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, and quite possibly the best popular science work on consciousness I’ve ever read. In opposition to how philosophers have traditionally approached the subject, Dehaene offers a naturalistic framework for what it means to be consciously aware of one’s thoughts and feelings. Yet at the same time, he rejects as reductionist demands by many of his fellow neuroscientists to simply put the topic aside, as it seems that consciousness simply does not lend itself to being studied in the lab the way one can study neural disorders (just last year, David Chalmers won a bet that researchers wouldn’t be able to discover the mechanism that generates consciousness within 25 years).
Discussions about consciousness often revolve around qualia — the “what it is like to be, feel or experience something — and from there on, things get messy real quick. Dehaene therefore suggests starting his investigation with what he calls access consciousness, i.e. being aware of information and able to report on it. Whether or not this fully captures what we mean by consciousness, it allows researchers to perform fairly straightforward experiments by simply asking subjects whether they registered something that was presented to them (see change blindness for one such example). It’s actually quite impressive how far Deheane is able to get with this, and how many counterintuitive conclusions can be derived from this research program!
Das Handwerk der Freiheit, Peter Bieri
No English translation seems to exist of this book, whose title literally means “the craft of freedom” but is perhaps better rendered as “The Practice of Free Will”. Bieri, who is probably better known as the author of Night train to Lisbon (published under his — laughable, sorry — nom de plume Pascal Mercier), tries to provide a non-technical account of why free will is such a difficult topic to wrap one’s head around. A lot of his exposition is dedicated to clarifying the meaning of terms we use when trying to understand what it means to decide, be able to choose between alternatives, have other options, change one’s mind, judge and evaluate — and do so knowing that we a physical beings, embedded in a physical world, that (at the relevant scales) appears to be utterly deterministic. It’s an eccentric book, written in a style that seems, well, extremely odd. Lots of little vignettes that feel pretty bizarre, and while the book does provide some amount of clarification around certain examples, I can understand why no publisher picked this up for translation.
Dreams of A Final Theory, Steven Weinberg
There is an almost irresistible temptation for physicists to imagine that they have gotten very close to decoding the fundamental laws of nature. This grand unified theory, as it is often called, would not be the end of science, or even just particle physics, but it would possess a status very different from a mere paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) or not-yet-falsified hypothesis (in the Popperian sense). What makes them believe that this tie is different, knowing that earlier generations of physics were just as convinced that all that was left to do was to perform more precise measurements of known parameters? I haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of it, but I do think it comes down to incredulity — it seems, if not impossible, then thoroughly unbelievable, that our best theories would be able to predict the outcomes of certain experiments with such an astonishing degree of precision that we’d have to assume divine mischief of the highest comedic order behind it all. Many if not most alternatives seem to be ruled out by effective field theories.
Apart from that, I did enjoy Weinberg’s account of how scientists make progress — how they come to formulate hypotheses, what makes them discard them, and more broadly how theory and experiment interact. His largely negative opinion about philosophers of science might be controversial, but I appreciate the pointed perspective and share his skepticism regarding attempts to derive a unified framework for the scientific method. This part is still very much worth reading, which is less true about the now pretty dated sections discussing the merits of building a new supercollider (Weinberg wrote in the early 90s, before the LHC was built).
Field Guide to Ultrarunning, Hal Koerner
It seems that one book on ultrarunning is all you ever need to read, and I had already done that many years ago. Although Koener promises to offer valuable insights for novices and seasoned trailrunners alike, I did not find anything I hadn’t heard before in his book. It feels hastily written, trying to cover too much ground in too little time, and devoid of nuance in areas where there’s a real controversy about the best approach (hydration, for example).
The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel
The simplest way to describe Scheidel’s main thesis is that there is no high road to achieving social equality (as, for example, expressed in a country’s Gini coefficient), but I’m not sure this is the correct reading. The Great Leveler is mostly a historic account, describing the forces that have made societies more equal, and it’s not pretty: The things that level the playing field tend to be civil wars, foreign invasion, deadly plagues and totalitarian reorganization of society. By and large, societies become more equal not by easing the lots of the poor and downtrodden, but by reducing wealth overall. I think this should be concerning regardless of political leanings: For those more on the left of the spectrum, realizing that redistribution and democracy have a pretty poor track record at achieving egalitarian goals should make them more skeptical about what they’re trying to achieve — either the goals themselves, or how far we can realistically expect to move there in a peaceful fashion. But it should be cold comfort for the other side of the spectrum as well, especially the free market crowd. If the price of economic growth is an ever-widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots, then the mere fact that it makes absolute levels of wealth rise for everyone may not be enough to ensure popular support.
I don’t know what the solution to this is, and Scheidel doesn’t pretend to know the answer either. Must we accept that we will be stuck in some sort of perpetual vicious circle, with prosperity rising in times of peace but progress being wiped out periodically, through human action on natural disasters? I’m skeptical that we can find other ways to foster economic growth than through arrangements that can by and large be described as capitalist, and therefore believe that we should devote more time and energy to thinking about how to make sure that such growth does not cause as much envy or frustration as it traditionally has. Not an easy task either!
Infinite Powers/The Joy of X , Steven Strogatz
These are two books, but it makes sense to review them together, since they’re so similar. Excellent material for people who struggled with math, never understood why they should care, nor caught a glimpse of the beauty of it. I felt a little nostalgic listening to them, as it reminded me how I first learned about complex numbers, differential equations and the like (which certainly weren’t introduced with the same mix of passion and curiosity to me back in the days as they are in this book). But even though I came across a few perspectives on basic concepts that I hadn’t heard of before, I’m probably not the right audience for this. I’m glad, though, to know that we have such able science communicators among us!
Mosquito, Micheal D’Antonio and Andrew Spielman
I spent the last year of my professional career understanding how the global health community thinks about malaria, the deadliest mosquito-borne disease. This taught me a lot about the types of interventions that have the greatest potential to reduce mortality and how mosquitoes adapt to those (the “red queen” analogy that suggests itself contains some truth but is also too pessimistic), but not a lot about the ecology (Konrad Lorenz thing) of the species. This book was a great gap filler, though certainly more of an introduction than an advanced textbook. Did you know that the US practice of importing used car tires from Japan became a public health issue, as the tiny puddles that form in those tires offer prime breeding ground for mosquito larvae?
Lifespan, David Sinclair
David Sinclair hates getting older. So much, in fact, that he has declared a war on aging — a war not fought on a traditional battlefield, of course, but in the minds of men, or, more concretely, the biomed laboratories and their associated funding bodies. Whereas most of us view aging (and eventual death) as an inherent part of life, Sinclair seems to quite literally think it can be eradicated altogether, if only we recognized aging as a disease and fought it the same way we fight cancer today.
There are times when he’s pretty disingenuous about what he’s trying to do. For all the talk about eliminating aging, I think what his research agenda is actually focusing on is (a) how to extend human lifespan significantly and (b) make those additional years a worthwhile and fulfilling experience, rather than simply tacking on additional years of misery at the tail end. Which is much less controversial! Unfortunately, these bait-and-switch tactics seem to be a recurring thread in the book: He often jumps from proxy measures found in lab experiments with rats to fairly wide-ranging and general claims about what these findings imply for human mortality.
A more generous reading is that what he’s really up against is the medical establishment that fails to live up to its own potential by stubbornly insisting that we simply need to accept aging, and age-related disease, as part of the natural cause of things. In a way, parts of Sinclair’s agenda have been realized over the last maybe 150 years: We are indeed living longer, healthier lives than did previous generations. But we’re falling short of where we could be because we don’t recognize aging for what it is and fight it with the same vigor we fought vaccine-preventable diseases, cardiovascular afflictions or various forms of cancer. I appreciate this perspective and, on the margin, think this is a push in the right direction. But read John Gray’s Immortalization Commission for some sobering realism.
Night, Elie Wiesel
I’m worried that there isn’t an appropriate way to review an Auschwitz survivor’s account of how his entire family was exterminated in the Nazi death camps, and so I won’t. Read it, of course (or any other first-person account that speaks to you), as soon the last surviving eyewitnesses will pass away, and upholding the memory of the Holocaust will remain our collective responsibility.
Bizarrely, the thing that stuck most with me was the utter and incomprehensible lack of rebellion as the community was expropriated, moved into ghettos and finally wheeled off into the gas chambers. Did they delude themselves into thinking that they had to make just one more concession to appease their oppressors? Should this make us think differently about drawing red lines in the face of dangerous developments? Are we similarly at risk of being complacent about looming disaster?
Upheaval, Jared Diamond
I think it’s fair to classify this as the work of an eminent researcher overstepping his boundaries, someone who, deluded perhaps by his own eminence, in old age decided to gift the world a sweeping theory of everything in an area only tangentially related to his earlier work. The result, unsurprisingly, is rather disappointing, combining long retellings of several countries’ recent histories with a superficial analysis of how those nations found a way out of the crises they were trapped in. I went through but two of them (Finland and Germany) — the latter pretty basic high school history, the former containing a lot more I didn’t know — and decided to skip the rest.
