Matt Bors's Life Begins at Incorporation:

I have been a fan of Matt Bors for a while.  His cartoons are funny and pointed; he is clever on twitter. I bought this book because I believe in supporting artists who I like, and I have to give this book my unqualified praise.  I am now a bigger fan of Bors having read this book than I was before.

This book is a collection of comics and essays covering contemporary events from a left / civil libertarian viewpoint.  What impressed me was how clean and articulate he is on the page given more room to let out his mind than a tweet or a comic.  It was kind of like he was living in my head, and saw a lot of how I feel about politics an life and wrote it better than I could have.  And he can draw.  I think I have a bit of a guy crush on him (Is that even a thing?).

Anyways, buy this book.  Do it for Matt.  He needs money.

Smith's Who Stole the American Dream: I'm still working on my enemies list

I read a lot of books and blogs about politics and economics from a leftwing perspective.  If you look at the charts and graphs, so many of them show a disconnect with previous trends somewhere between 1970 and 1980.  I know that there are faces  and names that people like to point to as drivers of that and punk songs denouncing Ronnie and Maggie, but I was curious about the root of the deregulation movement and the rise of “neoliberalism” (however you want to define that term).  I had a feeling that there was someone behind the figureheads who helped birth our right wing nation between Nixon and Reagan.  

I thus asked a shorter version of that question and was recommended this book.  It is well written, though a bit longer than I prefer  (443 pages without the notes). Smith takes the prime mover to be the “Powell Memo,” a plan for the long game that got us here today.  For what I was interested in, that felt glossed over, and it was the contemporary situation that Smith explored in more depth – and well.  I hate to fault a book for being good but just not being good at what I was looking for, but here I am doing it. I think the title might be part of the problem. I felt that it was more about people who have lost the American dream and less about helping me build an enemies list.  A lot has been written about the current situation (and I am sure historians will write a lot more as time passes), but I wanted to know more about these guys where dismantling the dream.

One thing to make clear

I read a lot and widely, but I have zero retention.
Therefore, I know nothing.

Which way does the demand curve slope?

Does it matter?

Good Tidings and Great Joy: Bad Rhetoric but not a bad Person

I am pretty close to the militant secular atheist that the Governor speaks of in this book.  

From the media portrayal of her in 2008 and beyond, I have had a pretty low opinion of her.  I even had a  “Palin 2012” shirt made up as a joke.  I may have been a little too hasty in judging her.  I watched the documentary featuring her, “The Undefeated,” and realized that someone who had been elected to the city council and to the mayoralty of a city is not someone to be ridiculed.  

In this vein, I thought I would look at her most recent work, “Good Tidings and Great Joy”.  It is nominally an argument to reclaim Christmas from the creeping secular atheists, but sometimes it diverges from that argument, and uses straw men to attack the author’s ideological opponents. For example, in three different places she lapses into fiction to draw a hypothetical which exaggerates what she sees as the worst aspects of her opponents.  

I, for one, though an atheist believe that some of the organized atheist groups go too far in limiting people’s celebration of holidays.  Where I agree with the atheists is that celebrations shouldn’t be exclusionary for people of other faiths or of no faith.  It is in the public sphere where this is most contentious, and I think there can be pluralism.  It was here where I was surprised that Ms. Palin and I are in agreement.  One of her bits of advice to keep the celebration of Christmas was to bring in the secular totems of the holiday, such as snowmen and Santa Claus. 

Where I think Ms Palin errs though is that there are basically three separate realms she covers where Christmas is under attack, but she conflates all three into one unified front against Christmas.  There is the previously identified sphere.  There is also the private realm: as far as I know, no one is trying to limit the celebration of anyone’s holiday in their churches and homes.  This is the section of the book that really helped me feel sympathy towards the Governor. Her family’s traditions are nice and familiar and fine with me.  

The last section is the public realm.  Ms. Palin doesn’t like the pluralism of some companies, where they have made their employees substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.” She even celebrates occasions where those companies  have relented and brought back Christmas.  Again, that is fine.  There is a marketplace where companies avoid controversy.  In the system we have, that is understandable.

So basically, I can agree with here on two out of three realms, which is two more than I was suspecting that I would find. I thought that reading this book would be one of those gleeful-hate reads, but it was nothing of the sort.  I like Sarah Palin more than I thought I did. 

Praise for Bo Burnham's Work: Specifically "Egghead"

Here’s the thing about Bo Burnham.  

He’s smart.

I pride myself on my intellectual abilities.  I was always top of my class; I graduated with honors; I never had to worry about doing well on standardized tests.

But Bo is scary smart.  My wife and I have watched both of his specials, and one of the things we have talked about after watching and laughing at his performances is this premature intelligence  that is blended with an emotional self-knowledge that is rare in someone so young.  I know I didn’t have it when I was his age.  I doubt I have it now.

He has time to grow into it, and I think this book of poems, “Egghead,” may be showing some of what he may look like as a mature artist.  

Egghead intersperses poems that are on the surface easy – meter, unchallenging rhyme schemes, with fun pictures that tend towards the dirty.  The poems tend that way too.  One included in the volume, which was read in the special, extol the virtues of women with little virtue.  I can’t print the title here.

He stands poems like that – sophomoric, juvenile, what have you – with some deep and wise ones.  There is a poem about women’s body images that knocked me flat.  I won’t quote it here because it is short and you need to take that journey yourself.

I can’t wait for whatever Bo has in store for us next, no matter what the medium.

The Why Axis. Competent but done already.

If you’ve read around in social science circles, you most likely will have come across the Israeli daycare study.  Researchers noticed that there was a social cost to picking up children late, and determined to see what would happen if a true monetary cost was applied – instead of being shamed for picking up the kids late, what would happen if you had to pay a price.  It was seen that where you had to pay for picking up your kids late, more kids were picked up late. 

I have seen it short-handed so often that the question of who did the study has faded into the background.  Like the Jam Study or the Marshmallow study, they are social science catnip, glommed onto by writers both popular and academic.

So—when I was reading this book, and in the introduction the waiters (using an awkward “We” formation for first person) started to imply that they were the ones who did it, I got mad.  That’s until I looked up the original study and found that one of the coauthors of this book was one of the coauthors of that study.  I suppose that if I were in the field deeper, I would know that, but I knew just enough to jump to mistaken conclusions.

All that was to set up this: the authors know what they’re talking about.  This book is a well-written defense of the importance of not only looking at incentives but also taking your hypotheses into the field for testing.  That is the key take-away.  The problem is that theirs is not the first to make those claims. This book, like the reference to the daycare study, feels generic because I have read so many authors doing similar work that nothing pops out.  If you have not read Ariely or Geno or Sunnstein with Thaler, this book will open your eyes to a cool field of study. Otherwise, it is only for completest.

The American Way of Poverty: Thinking Too Small

Abramsky’s thought-provoking book is an ambitious task: he wants to follow the path Michael Harrington blazed in “The Other America” (as well as journalists like Jacob Riis before that). He wants to show the way poverty is lived in America, which he does for the first 200 or so pages of the book.  He then pivots and tries to lay out policy prescription to alleviate the suffering that he covers.

I have to go a bit back-handed here,  but the strength of this book is the interviews in the first part. Anyone who has had any sort of brush with poverty can see themselves the stories of the people’s lives he looks at. The problem is that in setting the stage for the policy prescriptions he favors, they may not do enough to show how systemic the issue is so it may not make the case for the changes the country needs made.  In reading the first part, the main thing I kept going back to in my head was the word “anecdotal”.  It is not data-driven.

I think that is also my worry about the second part of the book.  He claims to want to not make major changes, but that some of these things he wants to change at the margins could alleviate the issues he brings up in the first section.  They seemed so outside the current discourse that I turned to the back to check his bio asking myself “Is he an economist?” (Not that that precludes anyone from making policy prescriptions, but the numbers were getting a little out of hand (multiple 1% taxes add up.))

Namely, I flagged a one that I need to bring to light.  This was his proposal to start a national education fund like social security so that students wouldn’t need to borrow as much to go to tertiary school (258-60).  Not a bad proposal, but he wants to fund it with a payroll tax.  Once that starts working,  the idea is that whatever is in surplus would be paid directly to the national debt to make the tax more appealing to the debt hawks.  It struck me as a proposal from some undergraduate paper that was naive in the current political climate and in accounting. I say this as someone who wants full social revolution and thus am sympathetic towards  his project.  Perhaps Abramsky’s biggest error is in not shooting higher.