Ted Rall’s “Bernie”

Of all the major party candidates in my lifetime, there has been none who have come as close to my politics as he has. I voted for him in my state’s primary. But I’m not passionate for him. I guess it’s the thing of having to be pragmatic and running in the two-party system that makes me mad. The electoral system is so rotten that even a sitting senator has to run within the party system to get media coverage and that weird circular legitimacy. Where you’re not important if you don’t have coverage and you can’t get coverage if you’re not important.

And I like Ted Rall’s work, so this book is right up my alley. Most of it is a biography of Bernard, but it starts out with a long gloss on the history of politics for the last 40 years or so. Rall’s trying to make the case towards someone like me, who is sympathetic but has doubts. Like I said, I voted for Bernie, but I haven’t volunteered or give him any money. Maybe I’m just being too cynical.  Maybe this will start a movement, or maybe the Republicans will win with Ted in the fall and the Democratic insiders will make the argument that the party needs more pre-surrenders on policy positons preferred by the far left.

On John Kay's "Other People's Money"

Kay’s book has one of the most honest parentheticals in the history of finance books. After a sentence on synthetic CDOs, he has an aside where he says quote: “(You really don’t want to know)” (p 60). 

 So you get a sense of the tone and intended audience of this book here. I liked about the first two thirds of the book, but he ends up after looking at all the problems with the finance industry that the issue with the industry is “too much government involvement in the financial sector, not too little” (p 203). 

And with me being a statist and an interventionist, I reluctantly followed him down the path for the last third where he approving cited Austrian school thinkers and even worse – he mentions Nassim Taleb approvingly (which is an impeachable offense in my Republic). So it is interesting to look at a thinker who can identify many of the same problems that you do but who has a vastly different prescription than you do, but the enjoyment level dropped from when I was reading as a compatriot to when I was forced to read as a critoc. Not everyone will follow that path and Kay is smart and a clear writer, so this is a book that I would mostly recommend.

The Only Thing That Will Save Capitalism from Itself is Socialism: A Haiku Review of Ford’s “The Rise of the Robots”

What if we look

into the mirror and see,

the robot is we?

When is a Campaign Book not a Campaign Book?: Thomas Frank's "Listen Liberal"

The cover is still blurbing Frank for “What’s the matter with Kansas,” as if he hasn’t written other books since then, but I bet that is the one that keeps funding his lavish liberal lifestyle – wait, not liberal but something more than that. Lefter than that.

Anyways.

This was interesting for me to read since it is basically an anti-Hillary book, but it doesn’t mention the guy she’s running against for her party’s nomination. I just looked, and that guy (whatever his name is) isn’t even listed in the index. I’m not sure how conscious of a choice that was, but if she doesn’t win, this thing will be dated by mid-November of 2016. I have also been reading the complete works of the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, and when I was reading this, I was reading his primary sources on the Clinton years. Which seems to be the springboard for her national exposure –as odd as that is. Seriously, New York elected her Senator when she’s owned a house there for six months. That’s democracy in action. Glad this meritocracy works. But the Tom Tomorrow cartoons really reminded me of the deficiencies of the Clinton years from a liberal perspective. I was in high school. I kept up on the news, but it was local papers, Time, and Newsweek, so there wasn’t much lefter-than-thou criticism that I was able to see. That’s rural boyhood for you.

I think the book does make the case against her, but for me I wasn’t ever really for her to begin with, more indifferent. I guess if the state is close and she’s the nominee I’ll vote for her, but it doesn’t excite me. I just hope someone captures the enthusiasm that has been generated by the campaign of the other guy (and makes all sorts of electoral reforms so we’re not hoping the Democratic Party will be the authors of our salvation.

One Long Ted Talk: Adam Grant's "Originals"

I want to like Adam Grant.

In a shorter medium (blogs and articles in places like HBR), he has written some smart things, and he has worked professionally with people I like.

His books seem to miss the mark though. His first, Give and Take, had some interesting ideas in it. It is just that Grant seems to have this thought where he should be publishing on a big idea. Therefore, in that first book, he created a trichotomy where people fit in one of three categories professionally – you were either a giver, a taker, or a matcher. The key was to be the matcher. However, there was a weird caveat that it was not all matchers. I liked the book well enough that I remember that taxonomy that he drew, but it felt like a letdown because it relied too heavily on a few examples.

It is as if he does take that big idea he wants to talk about, finds the examples, and then uses them as a highlight. Maybe it is a narrative thing he’s doing (he does call himself a social scientist in this book more than once), trying to use examples to tell a better story because data is not as fun to read on the train, I don’t know. But he makes the same choices in Originals as he did in Give and Take.

Therefore, that lead me, as I was reading, to try to think of this book and how I would describe it. In one sense, it does feel like it is pointed towards some self-satisfied liberal elite establishment pseudo-intellectual thing. I mean, look at the blurbs. Sheryl Sandberg helped edit it as per the acknowledgements, and she wrote the forward. It is blurbed by Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Branson, Ariana Huffington, and Peter Thiel, to show you what the intended audience is. For what it’s worth, it feels like an extended TED talk. For me, that is not a charitable comparison, but it may appeal to some people.

All this is not to say that there is not valuable information and insights embedded in the book. There is a part about Martin Luther King prepping his famous “I have a Dream Speech”. There is an extended section on the birth of the women’s suffrage that brought to my attention an important figure in American history I was very unaware of. The problem is that these sections were used to illustrate the broader points that Grant was speaking on and it may not have been the best fit (the lessons were “procrastination can be useful” and then “build coalitions”). It is as if Grant is just pulling in the things that are interesting to him and trying to apply them to the larger idea that being original is good.

This of course is true. But for me the most troubling thing was that originality as looked at in the book was focused mostly on business success, with a side of politics. The only originality that Grant wrote of in the arts was in comedy – nothing about Duchamp or John Cage, but we learn how birth order may influence how often a baseball player steals a base. My guess is that art is just too far outside of Grant’s domain for him to write cogently on it, but it is a huge blind spot in a book about the importance of originality (No “Make it new” or worrying about the anxiety of influence). Nevertheless, perhaps that is just showing my domain preferences.