Man Not Boogeyman: "Karl Marx: A Life" by Francis Wheen

About three or four years ago, I went to go on a walk in the woods with my wife. It was early spring and the sun was shining, so we hoped to take the day and make the most of it. Or she did, and I have problems saying no to her when she asks because she’s just so darn persuasive. The walk didn’t last long. No one told the snowpack on the trail that it needed to have melted so that we could walk on the trail.

I’m not sure how I managed it, but there was a mall with an actual physical book store close by the trail we were trying to walk. At one point I had at least a couple hundred dollars worth of books in my hand (hardbacks at bookstore prices). One of them was the new biography of Marx that had recently come out. I almost bought it but put it down because I realized that a life of Marx is one of those things that is hard to be objective about. I didn’t want to spend seven hundred pages with an author who was a staunch Hegelian mad about Marx’s subversion of their hero or some marginalist economist mad that the subject didn’t fully wrestle with the mathematics of their revolution. Or, you know, whatever else you could possibly see the life of Marx and his ideas being politicized somehow.

So instead of buying that unknown book, I went looking for people who had read various lives and what they would recommend to read. The Wheen biography came up a lot. So I bought that book, and then I put it on my shelf as a decoration and then forgot about it for the next several years. And recently, once I finished my MBA program, I found myself with time and inclination to go about reading some of the scores of books I own but haven’t read yet, and a familiar name looked out at me from the shelf.

For any student of the left, the life and career of Marx is knowable in broad strokes - youth in Germany, exile in England, friendship with Engels. Wheen fills all of those blank spots in. What Wheen does more than anything else is to humanize Marx from someone that is a boogeyman of the cold war to a guy with a family trying to make due in Victorian England.

I think Wheen, like myself, had already made his mind up about Marx before he approached this book. If there is any criticism to be had, I offer two. For one, it is only 400 pages. What lacks for me is a deeper engagement with the philosophy and economics of Marx. I’m not sure if that was a choice made to keep the book more accessible or why it was made. But I think it plays into my other criticism. I felt that the author may have been too sympathetic to Marx. He was a human who did make some bad choices (like maybe cheating on Jenny Marx) and I think glossing over that nuance in fear of attacking the subject makes the book less than what it could be. This sympathy is also evident where he addresses some of the more well-known intellectual rivals to Marxism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and  Mikhail Bakunin, so that these men and their followers are diminished in the book, the casual reader isn’t really let into why Marxian ideas are superior.

Overall, though, if you only know those broad strokes then the Wheen biography is a good entry point for learning about the life of Marx. If you want to get deeper into his ideas, there are other avenues, like the work of David Harvey or Paul D’Amato. Or you can just climb the mountain of Capital itself, something I need to do.

On "Pound Foolish" by Helaine Olen

The writer of the fine Trekonomics, Manu Saadia, pointed me to Olen’s work in a conversation (you can pick up that name, since I dropped it and am done using it). What this book is is a complete and thorough debunking of your favorite personal finance guru. Most are charlatans, it seems that the real question is to what degree are they charlatans.

What I take away is that like some presidential candidates, what is being sold is not success per se, but the idea of success. Wrap yourself in the rich dad poor dad millionaire next door Jim Cramer etc mindset and you too can be rich. Having long been skeptical of people searching for gurus, Olen’s book is a breath of fresh air.  What is missing is a bunking where the debunking went.

Aside from don’t follow these fools, I was at least looking for something that might guide what I should look for - the best advice Olen claims to have found is to short the stocks that Cramer pumps, as well as buying TIPS. Even my well-worn advice of buying index funds comes under some scrutiny here, and I want a guru. Wait, I think I get it now.

On "What Do We Do About Inequality?" by the WPC

The authors in this book approach the problem(s) of inequality in many different ways. One of the strengths of the work is the plurality of voices. This allows you to see the issue from multiple angles and experiences. If you don’t already, the voices here are important to follow across social media, especially twitter.

One weakness is that some of the writing is already available in other places. Tressie Cottom’s essay about the lived experience of being poor and making the wrong choices as perceived by outsiders is the most powerful essay in the book, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read it twice before this book because of people posting it on Twitter.

That said, there are other voices that I had not read in depth yet. There is an essay by Scott Santens, the first part of which is the best, most clear explanation of how a UBI would work - and this is something I’m very interested in as a potential response to inequality and I’m glad that in the last year or so that it has become part of the conversation.

Ultimately though, the book’s strength is also part of its weakness. Since there are a lot of voices, there is no one thing that we can take away as the answer to the titular question. Having this be an issue aired recently and on the tips of the tongues from economists like Deaton and Piketty and Milanovic is good, but it is at the grassroots that hopefully will move the needle. I just worry the robots will rise before we work out an equitable distribution to the gains of the productivity and that in ten years we will be asking the same questions from a scarier baseline.

I received an advance review copy, so I don’t want to talk too much about formatting, but a couple things stuck out. For one, there is no identification of the writers and their educational or professional background. This may have been a deliberate choice, but it diminished it a bit as a reader, since I wasn’t able to place the writer into my hermeneutic circle or whatever. Also, the notes are numbered sequentially and not broken up by the essay, making them a bit harder to get into if I wanted to chase a source.

Soylent is....not that bad, actually

I have a living pod in my office at work. I have a plastic drawer system for my dry good eats and a mini fridge which is mostly for Diet Mountain Dew.

I had been using muscle milks and stuff like that mainly for meal replacements, but to be honest I wasn't working out enough to justify all the protein I was taking in through the shakes. Admittedly, this is a product that just on the idea has some merit - quick, complete meal. I'm an accountant, and I'm often stuck at my desk for lunch and I need to get things done and I was already using something else to fill the niche that this fills. I think this fills it better, but that branding is too much. The Soylent name with the hyper-minimalist branding is so easily mockable it is hard to say that I do like it at all, though I do. I'm just not some sort of tech-bro with self-diagnosed aspergers.

For what it is supposed to do, it works well, I don't have any sugar spikes or carb crashes, and it is filling even for a drink. I saw elsewhere someone compare this to wet cardboard, but it is better than that. On the first drink, there is a subtle sweetness, and then drinking more it does flatten out. It's not horribly bad, which is what I was afraid of.

Tribalism: Standing Up by Sitting Down

There is a sense that in this world, one of the things that is missing is a belonging to a larger whole.

We are alone or in small family groups and there is a huge scary world out there. This may be overly reductive, but there is something about joining and belonging that is important enough that sociologist write books about it like The Lonely Crowd or Bowling Alone.


We substitute this sense of belonging with fandoms on in a way. It can be a type of music or fictional world or a political party or even sports teams – this creates an important sense of belonging that can be mocked but is what helps us create a sense of identity. If you had to describe yourself, it is often by what you do and then next by what you like. Walk through a parking lot and look at the stickers on the back of the cars. These stickers are all the person choosing their tribal allegiances and putting that out in the world.


This tribalism is also what causes controversy.


Kaepernick or Cardale Jones of Ali or John Carlos standing up for themselves and bringing attention to causes that concern them makes people mad. I think it is not just because people are racist. Believe me, I find it odd that situations like this will bring people forward to say in a public forum attached to their name that someone should go back to Africa or call them hateful names. But it is not just the reaction of sad men thinking they’re losing whatever perceived power they have.

Tribalism causes people getting mad because athletes are stepping out of their perceived tribal roles. You see the same thing when actors or musicians make the same kind of steps. There’s so much hatred for Bono because he decided to take his platform and try to do what he perceives as good. It seems that people in their tribes assign very important but narrow roles the athlete. They are alienated from their tribe when the shaman wants to be a farmer. The real problem is that this tribalism creates an environment where the pathetic racist thinks he can pop up in the discourse and try to other the person using their voice and platform – but this one is even greater, since they appeal to a new tribe, this one wrapped in the flag.

The Pyramid: The Fight for Personal Success in America

I want to talk today about something that concerns me. It’s about work, and the possibility of moving up. The metaphor of the ladder has long been with it, but it doesn’t seem true. It is less of a ladder than we suppose. I think of career advancement not as a ladder, but as a pyramid.

This was a problem I first really saw when I was in grad school. I wanted to be a professor. I was in English, so professing was one of the few viable things that we saw as options. We saw the professors as the logical end point of what we did in english. There was no other visible path. What you don’t realize as a precocious undergraduate student thinking to apply for grad school is the ratio of students to professors. There are a lot more of you than there are of them. And what you think of even less is all the other schools and all the other students ahead of and behind you who looked and also thought that being a professor was a good idea. There were far more of us who wanted to go on than there were spots in grad school. And somehow that wasn’t a red flag.

Photo by Simon Matzinger from Pexels

But it wasn’t just grad school and wanting to be a professor that makes me think of the pyramid. It came up again and again. There are only so many senior positions. I ended up not becoming a professor. I stopped way before I even had to make the decision if adjuncting was a worthwhile pursuit. Instead I bounced around a bit, went back and got a certificate in the booming medical field, and ended up the finance department of a nonprofit that serves the I/DD community.

My boss suggested that I go back and get more schooling - this time in business. So I did the grad school thing again, and I liked it again, but the myth of the ladder busted itself again. I had several professors who were not career business school people. These were talented people with experience higher up in multinational corporations, but they stopped fitting? Why? Thee pyramid, In the pyramid it is either up or out, and eventually these people ended up with the later side of that dichotomy. And that’s not a knock on these individuals. They might not have seen themselves mid-career, adjuncting night classes. I don’t see myself there, but I recognize the potential is there based on the way the system is constructed.

I am one of the people on the generational cusp. Some think pieces called me Gen X years ago, and more are calling my birth year the first year of the millennials in those articles that claim that millennials cause all the problems. But what if it is not generational? It comes back to the pyramid. If moving through the ladder is hard when people are retiring later, imagine how much harder it is to climb the pyramid when there is not a one-for-one replacement on the rungs, but ever-narrowing number of people allows as you approach the apex. I see this in my own career. I have moved up rather swiftly. I was promoted from coordinator to manager to director so fast that I never found time to get the business cards that had the manager title on them. But as much as I like my job and my organization, the pyramid is still in play. There’s two Vice Presidents and a President / CEO ahead of me.

What this means is that though I have a lot to learn in my current position and as much as I like my job, I’m a bit stuck. I need my boss to move on or die before I get a shot. Or maybe her boss to do either one and then I’d have to hope for the second degree to work. Here’s the thing about the pyramid though - I could never get that shot. Someone else could come with better credentials and more youthful energy and surpass me. Then I’d fall victim to the pyramid. There are other considerations too, I’m far enough along and with enough financial obligations there’s not just a narrowing above me, there’s a floor below me. It may be called the golden handcuffs, or whatever you want to call it, but taking time to retrain is not an option. You can make mistakes in your 20’s, but by your 30’s you’re committed. So up or down there are real constraints. I might never get that PhD in economics that I want, but in 26 years this house will be mine free and clear.

This squeeze is the essence of the pyramid. It is up or out. And that’s not how we as a society should reward hard work and intelligence. There has to be a better way, no matter your preferred economic system. There are so many people who get stuck at or near the bottom and never see a realistic way up. Those with realistic ways up get blocked for whatever reason. Those at the top can claim merit but so much is luck of the draw that the idea of meritocracy is a myth. Too many people worry about climbing the ladder, not knowing it is a pyramid. The ladder is myth, the pyramid is reality, and both inhibit human flourishing.

Prohibition Will Confuse Our Grandchildren as it Should Embarrass Us: Wainwright's "Narco-Nomics"

Narco-nomics

This was an interesting book with a good angle - the fact of prohibition drive so much crime both at the source of the drugs and as they are passed along the value chain that prohibition doesn’t work, since these supply-side interventions barely raise the street price and do little to dent demand. Demand is driven more by fads and trends - and in the case of opiates, doctors over-prescribing legal pills that become too expensive so heroin is a cheap choice.’

The book’s subtitle is “How to run a drug cartel,” and I think that may over-sell it. I don’t think that I could go and run a cartel based off of the information in this book. It seems to be misplaced in terms of marketing: the book for the most part focuses on the americas, but there is an interlude about synthetic drugs in New Zealand that is interesting but seems out of touch with the rest of the narrative. It seems the author interviewed one of the synthetic entrepreneurs and wanted to keep that part in even though the bulk of the book focused on the origin of drugs in South America to the ultimate markets in the US and Western Europe (Very little mention is made of Asia, and none of Africa that I can remember, so this is not a global model, but a very western one).

Ultimately, I feel that Wainwright makes a strong case, but I was on his side before I even picked up the book. The current fact of prohibition (especially in marijuana)  is going to be one of those cultural embarrassments in a generation, KIds will be goggly-eyed at that fact that not only was weed illegal, the state would lock up men and women for decades just because they owned some of it. In a nation where owning people was fine for a significant part of its history, this fact is hard to justify - and this book helps show why.