Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg: Another Winner

What makes Duhigg’s books work – both this and the earlier “Power of Habit” – is not that he is doing any unique and new research. What makes his books work is a strange alchemy that makes the familiar new again while he spins the unfamiliar in with it. 

For example, in this book one of the stories he talks about is the redevelopment of the factory in California that was a failing GM plant but became NUMMI through a team-up with Toyota. Now, I’ve been to business school, so you can bet that I have heard about the Toyota way and have the book on my shelf. But Duhigg takes that story and personalizes it so that the reader learns along with the person in the book and the familiar becomes new. 

And that’s just one example. The author looks at eight different frames on how we can become better at what we do in a more productive manner through the power of storytelling. It’s as if the book wants to be a social science book and a novel and a self-help book all at once while at the same time never being any one of those on a stand-alone basis. It was a fun read and I hope that I absorbed some of it so that I too can become smarter and faster and better.

NB: I was provided with a review copy of this text in exchange for the possibility of a review

Praise for Branko Milanovic's "The Haves and Have Nots"

Milanovic has a book coming out, another one on inequality. 

But he was writing about inequality before Piketty made it cool.

I read his blog posts because Thoma points them my way some time, but I thought before engaging with the more current work, I would read this one, intriguingly subtitled “A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality”. The book is set up as three essays that are more wonkish and each essay is filled with some more detailed stories to support the larger ideas behind the essays.

He looks at three different kinds of inequality – that between people in the same nation; that between individual nations; and that between all the world’s citizens. I think that as a popular book about economics it works very well. The vignettes are enough that they can be accessible to someone with little background and they do help explain the more technical aspects of the larger essays. I wish more scientists wrote with the skill Milanovic does here. I am eagerly awaiting that new book, but I’m glad I read up on the background info.

History and Inspiration: "Red Rosa" by Kate Evans

I end up reading a fair number of graphic novels. The thing is that I normally just grab them from the library because I hate paying what is a higher price for a book that I will read much faster than a normal book. It makes my dollar per entertainment hour ratio increase and I’m sure that’s how most normal humans judge if they should buy a book. I am, however, glad that I purchased this book, because I can support my favorite radical publisher (Sorry, Haymarket) and I have a book I can pass along to like-minded friends – a book that most likely would not have been in my library anyways.

And it’s a good book. Before reading Red Rosa, I was only vaguely aware of her as the writer of Reform or Revolution and the General Strike. I also knew that she was a martyr to the cause of worldwide socialism. What I didn’t realize was that she had to fight her own party to not just go along with the bourgeois parties, like for example voting  to a man (and they were all men) for entry into WWI,  and instead work towards the last lines in the manifesto – “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” It is these lines that illuminated and drove her life from a precocious young woman in Poland to a death before her time.  Well worth reading for both history and inspiration.

A T-Junction of the Soul: Mohamed El-Erian's "The Only Game in Town"

I picked up this book because of the bright yellow and black cover. What can I say, I’m superficial. And it had some good blurbs on the back. Hadn’t read the author before, but I thought I’d take a chance when finally getting to the flap-text.

I was finishing it up in bed last night, and my wife was asking about it, and the best I could do to recommend it was that I wanted to finish it. I found it a slog mostly, but it was interesting enough to want to engage with all the way through. The author has two key points he kept hammering. One is that the potential for the future has turned from a normal to a bimodal distribution – the status quo will no longer have the chance to be the status quo. This leads to the other point, the T-Junction, where we will no longer get to muddle along because we are out of options. We can’t just drift on monetary policy, but we will have to make some choices. The gist is that we should follow the author’s prescriptions to get to the more desirable hump on the bimodal distribution by taking the correct turn. The second half just drags and the best thing I can say is that I did finish it, but I don’t recommend it. The author is obviously smart, but ultimately his argument lacks because of a missing story-telling verve.

Fundraising in the Digital Age

I was thinking about the telephone campaigns, and the one thing that really struck me was that no one in my generation really uses their phones. The irony is that we carry around these devices that are small computers that dwarf the power of those a generation ago - and we still call them phones but the voice communication part is just a small forgotten part of the phone’s functionality. So that made me think of how this fits into the philanthropic environment. I read that over 80% of those 35 and under prefer texts to phones (and I bet a lot of the 20% is in the older part of the generation - I just barely fit under the cut-off and if I text it is done awkwardly). The benefit of the phone is that you have someone on the spot. There’s a certain immediacy to it, and thankfully a lot of people are too nice to say “No”.

There have been some campaigns where there have been text components. I’m remembering after the Haitian earthquake where people could text to the red cross and the money would come out of their bill. I think some agencies tried to get on that bandwagon, but that would seem to cultivate one time donors who were responsive to a tragedy - not something that is really going to grow your donor base. Our book, so far, doesn’t address the future of fundraising. I’m not sure what it is though, since texts and emails are so easy to dismiss. Is it just sending more out there in the world and accepting a lower response rate? I don’t know.

The Ethics of Your List

Is it ethical to pay to acquire personal and/or mailing information (data mining) for potential donors? What what conditions should an organization pay or not pay to acquire such information?

I subscribe to a magazine that has a disclaimer saying “from time to time we will share your address with like-minded organizations” or something of the sort. Other places will say that they will never share your information with third parties.  I’m at the leading edge of the generation that grew up with computers in the house -- though we didn’t have the internet in my house until I was in high school. I think that our generation is accepting of the idea that we are being tracked. This is most likely online, where cookies attach to your browser and then the ads follow you around, trying to sell you something you were browsing for earlier in the week. We are such that when Snowden came forward with information about the government tracking us, for a large part there was a sigh of “so, what?”, because  tracking is just part of the system.

Thinking on this question, my first reaction was “Why wouldn’t it be ethical?”. After all, virtually no large-scale, sophisticated direct mail program is possible without the use of rented lists”. Given the number involved, between a 1-2% success rate, you need a lot of addresses, and I don’t know how you would go about getting those unless you had access to a third party. The fact that these third parties have information about your potential donors that goes deeper than their address is a huge strength for making your potential solicitation more successful. If I’m trying to raise money for aid to landmine victims in east asia, I’m going to strike all the people from my list who work at Acme Landmine Company.

It’s hard for me to see where it would be unethical. A piece of mail isn’t intrusive. If it doesn’t interest me I’ll throw it away. The only thing I could see is if your list assumes something about a person that might be embarrassing or damaging to the person receiving it. There was the much talked about incident where Target was able to identify pregnant women through their buying patterns, and they sent coupons to a teenage girl - outing her pregnancy to her family when they called to complain to the company. I just don’t see most nonprofits being at that level, so there seem very few ethical barriers to me.

Dani Rodrik's "Economics Rules": Too Narrow

I grabbed this book because it was making a minor stir in the blog-o-sphere.

It was kind of a let down. Rodrik is a bit of a rebel when it comes to economics discourse (once wrote a book doubting fully the benefits of globalization *fainting couch). But even then the options that he looks at seem narrowly circumscribed - mostly macro from new Keynesian to new classical! To his credit, Marx raises his head, if only to be dismissed.

What I really like is the framing of the book as looking at models, and how they are useful and how they are not as necessary simplifications of the real world - he even cites one of my favorite Jorge Borges stories to tell about the necessity of simplification. He also looks at the fox / hedgehog divide, in that true knowledge is knowing what model to use when looking at the explanation of a past event, and not over reliance on a strong theory that will too often lead you astray.

The big problem for me was that the model using is almost all backwards looking. If you know what happened and you can pick the right model you’re golden, but he discounts being able to know the future. Maybe I missed something, but isn’t a large part of trying to understand the past so that you can more accurately predict the future? If there is no ultimately one correct model and they do grow horizontally (a multiplicity) instead of replacing dead models as he calls it vertically, are we doomed to be having the same arguments generation after generation only with more powerful computers and fancier math?