Book review: Black Rednecks And White Liberals by Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell is a pretty smart guy. It’s unfortunate that he wastes his skills on reinforcing peoples’ existing political opinions. Much of what he says in this book is right, but the new ideas it offers don’t seem like they ought to change the political opinions of anyone who has thought much about racial politics. And the old but wise arguments are written in a style that seems designed to turn off anyone who isn’t already a fan of Sowell’s ideas.
He presents interesting evidence that the culture of black ghettos came from parts of Britain that were uncivilized at the time its bearers moved to the southern U.S. This is the kind of subject where it’s virtually impossible for most readers to tell whether he’s being objective or selecting evidence to fit his biases. More importantly, it’s hard to tell why it matters. Some people pay lip service to the authenticity of black culture, but I find it hard to believe that the origins of the culture several centuries ago plays an important role in peoples’ choice to adopt the culture.
One interesting aspect of Sowell’s story is that the large migration from the rural south to the urban north after WWII did not result in the usual assimilation of the migrants into the culture of the area they moved to. How much of that was due to the number of migrants, to their culture, or to their race? Sowell ignores this subject.
Sowell’s argument that western civilization was responsible for the nearly worldwide abolition of slavery seems mostly right, but I’m disturbed by his exaggerations. He misleads readers into thinking that the first abolitionists were western, but a quick web search told me that Cyrus the Great wanted to abolish slavery worldwide two millennia earlier.
There are several places in the book where he makes confident, unsupported assertions as if they were certain, when I doubt anyone has enough evidence to make anything better than a rough guess. For instance, he thinks George Washington couldn’t have gotten a prohibition on slavery into the constitution without driving the south out of the union (plausible, but it depends on hard-to-verify assumptions about his powers of persuasion), and that slavery would have lasted longer without the union (a controversial enough claim that abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison seemed to reject it, claiming the north would be a better haven for runaway slaves if it seceded and repealed the Fugitive Slave Law). There are probably some leftists who unfairly attack Washington for failing to accomplish more than he could possibly accomplish, but I don’t see signs that they get respect from anyone who would listen to Sowell.
I’m quite suspicious of Sowell’s claim that Hitler’s pretenses of having been provoked into military action were intended only to fool people in Germany. Even if people in other countries had enough information to know Hitler was lying, it’s easy to imagine that a fair number of them were looking for a way to rationalize neutrality, and that Hitler was helping them to fool themselves.
Book Reviews
Book review: Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big And Small by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres.
This is a very entertaining and somewhat thought-provoking book. I’m uncertain whether it had much effect on my creativity. It certainly demonstrates the authors’ creativity, and gives some insights into how their creative thought processes work. But it’s probably more valuable as a collection of interesting ideas than it is as a recipe for creativity.
While they focus more on presenting interesting ideas than on evaluating how well they would work, the do a decent job of anticipating problems and understanding the relevant incentives.
Possibly the most important idea is mandating anonymity of political campaign contributions (see also the book Voting with Dollars) as an alternative way of ensuring that it’s hard for contributions to influence politicians votes, with plausible suggestions about how to ensure that it’s hard for donors to evade the anonymity rule.
Their examples often leave me wondering why the ideas they describe are so little known (e.g. the anonymity requirement has been tried in 10 states for judicial elections – why hasn’t that been reported widely?).
Another interesting idea is how tests of black boxes in cars (similar to those in planes) cause drivers to drive much more safely (20 to 66 percent declines in accident rates – “Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed”).
I am disappointed that it doesn’t have an index.
Book review: How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
This book makes plausible and somewhat thought-provoking claims about how an altruist ought to spend money to provide the most benefit to the needy. It concludes that high priorities should include control of HIV, malaria, malnutrition, and trade barriers.
It appears to come close to being a good book. It addresses fairly good questions about important issues. Unfortunately, it has been simplified for readability to such an extent as to prevent it from accomplishing much. Its arguments aren’t sufficiently detailed or backed by references for me to evaluate them. So they were probably intended to be accepted as a result of the authors’ authority. But their credentials leave plenty of room for doubt about how much deference their authority deserves.
So I’m left unsatisfied, and highly uncertain whether I ought to read the more detailed version of this book (Global Crises, Global Solutions).
Book review: The Purchase of Intimacy by Viviana A. Zelizer
This book provides a convincing argument that even though many people talk as if intimacy and the exchange of money belong in separate spheres that would contaminate each other if mixed, most people regularly behave in ways that mix them. She provides an alternate view under which a more narrow set of restrictions on the use of money helps prevent specific types of relationships from being transformed into some less desired category of relationship.
The arguments are phrased to appeal to a wide range of ideologies (but probably not the religious right). But the style is dry, and the numerous legal cases and other examples quickly become tedious and often unneeded. It’s hard to imagine what kind of person would want to read more than the first 100 pages plus the final chapter.
She uses a broader definition of intimacy than I expected, but provides plenty of hints as to why that is appropriate.
One nice example of her evidence is the fact that buying a pet doesn’t prevent people from loving the pet.
One strange passage which raises a few doubts about the otherwise apparently good research behind the book is the definition of “the unfamiliar term polyamory” which makes no reference to love and hints that it typically refers to non-romantic relationships.
Book review: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink.
This well-written book might help a few people lose a significant amount of weight, and many to lose a tiny bit.
Some of his advice seems to demand as much willpower for me as a typical diet (e.g. eat slowly), but he gives many small suggestions and advises us to pick and choose the most appropriate ones. There’s enough variety and novelty among his suggestions that most people are likely to find at least one feasible method to lose a few pounds.
A large fraction of his suggestions require none of the willpower that a typical diet requires, but will be rejected by most people because their ego will cause them to insist that only people less rational than them are making the kind of mistakes that the book’s suggestions will fix.
Most of the book’s claims seem to be backed up by careful research. But I couldn’t find any research to back up the claim that approaches which cause people to eat 100 calories per day less for days will cause people to lose 10 pounds in ten months. He presents evidence that such a diet doesn’t need to make people feel deprived over the short time periods they’ve been studied. But there’s been speculation among critics of diet books that our bodies have a natural “set point” weight, and diets which work for a while have no long-term effect because lower body weights cause increased desire to return to the set point. This book offers only weak anecdotal evidence against that possibility.
But even if it fails as a diet book, it may help you understand how the taste of your food is affected by factors other than the food itself.
Book review: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
This book makes a plausible argument that string theorists are following a fad that has little scientific promise. But much of the book leaves me with the impression that the disputes he’s describing can only be fully understood by people who devote years to studying the math, and that the book has necessarily simplified things for laymen in ways that leave out many important insights.
The argument I found most impressive was his claim that relativity shows that background independence is important enough that any theory which unites relativity with quantum mechanics will preserve relativity’s background independence (a result which string theorists don’t pursue). Still, this seems to be little more than an intuition, and until someone creates the revolutionary theory that unites relativity and quantum mechanics, there ought to be plenty of doubt about which approach is best.
His sociological analysis of the problems with physics is less impressive. His endorsement of Feyeraband’s belief that there’s no such thing as a scientific method seems implausible (although it seems plausible for some stages of scientific thought, such as decisions about what questions to ask; maybe I ought to read Feyeraband’s writings on this subject).
I’m unimpressed by his lengthy gripes about the large fraction of funding that goes to routine science rather than revolutionary science. He implies this is making revolutionary science harder than it used to be, but I still see signs that a revolutionary scientist today would follow a path similar to Einstein’s and encounter no greater obstacles.
He wonders why those who fund scientific research don’t fund some research the way the best venture capitalists do – taking risks of 90% of their choices failing in order to get a few really big successes. He seems to think risk aversion is the main reason. What I see missing from his analysis is the absence of large rewards to the funder who picks the next Einstein. I think that to get VC-like attitudes in funding agencies, we would need systems where part of the money and prestige of a Nobel prize went to a few people who made the key decisions to fund the prize-winning research. I expect it would be hard to alter existing institutions to replace committee-based funding decisions with the kind of individual authority needed for these incentives to work.
His proposal to avoid having one unproven paradigm such as string theory dominate the funding in its area by limiting the funding to any one research program to one third of the total seems naive. The most direct effects of such a rule would be that researchers get around the rule by redefining the relevant categories (e.g. claiming that string theory research is diverse enough to qualify as several independent programs, or altering whatever category is used to define the total funding).
He wants academics who have authority to influence hiring decisions to have the kind of training in avoiding prejudice and promoting diversity that their commercial equivalents get. I suspect he is way too optimistic about what that training accomplishes – my impression is that it’s designed mostly to minimize the risk of lawsuits, and does more to hide biases than it does to prevent them.
Book review: Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff.
This book makes a few good points about what cognitive science tells us about differing concepts associated with the word freedom. But most of the book consists of attempts to explain his opponents’ world view that amount to defending his world view by stereotyping his opponents as simplistic.
Even when I agree that the people he’s criticizing are making mistakes due to framing errors, I find his analysis very implausible. E.g. he explains Bush’s rationalization of Iraqi deaths as “Those killed and maimed don’t count, since they are outside the war frame. Moreover, Bush has done nothing via direct causation to harm any Iraqis and so has not imposed on their freedom”. Anyone who bothers to listen to Bush can see a much less stupid rationalization – Bush imagines we’re in a rerun of World War II, where the Forces of Evil have made it inevitable that some innocent people will die, and keeping U.S. hands clean will allow Evil to spread.
Lakoff’s insistence that his opponents are unable to understand indirect, systematic causation is ironic, since he shows no familiarity with most of the relevant science of complex effects of human action (e.g. economics, especially public choice economics).
He devotes only one sentence to what I regard as the biggest single difference between his worldview and his opponents’: his opponents believe in “Behavior as naturally governed by rewards and punishments.”
His use of the phrase “idea theft” to describe uses of the word freedom that differ from his use of that word is objectionable both due to the problems with treating ideas as property and with his false implication that his concept of freedom resembles the traditional U.S. concept of freedom (here’s an example of how he rejects important parts of the founders’ worldview: “One of the biggest mistakes of the Enlightenment was to counter this claim with the assumption that morality comes from reason. In fact, morality is grounded in empathy”).
If his claims of empathy are more than simply calling his opponents uncaring, then it may help explain his bias toward helping people who are most effective at communicating their emotions. For example, a minimum wage is part of his concept of freedom. People who have their wages increased by a minimum wage law tend to know who they are and often have labor unions to help spread their opinions. Whereas a person whom the minimum wage prevents from getting a job is less likely to see the cause or have a way to tell Lakoff about the resulting harm. (If you doubt the minimum wage causes unemployment, see http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663 for a recent survey of the evidence.)
This is symptomatic of the biggest problem with the book – he assumes political disagreements are the result of framing errors, not differences in understanding of how the world works, and wants to persuade people to frame issues his way rather than to use scientific methods when possible to better measure effects that people disagree about.
The book also contains a number of strange claims where it’s hard to tell whether Lakoff means what he says or is writing carelessly. E.g. “Whenever a case reaches a high court, it is because it does not clearly fit within the established categories of the law.” – I doubt he would deny that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld fit clearly within established habeas corpus law.
This is a book which will tempt people to believe that anyone who agrees with Lakoff’s policy advice is ignorant. But people who want to combat Lakoff’s ideology should resist that temptation to stereotype opponents. There are well-educated people (e.g. some behavioral economists) who have more serious arguments for many of the policies Lakoff recommends.
Book review: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
This book presents carefully researched evidence that suicide bombers are motivated primarily by a desire to force democracies to withdraw troops from the territories claimed by the bombers, that they use rational strategies to achieve their goals, and that suicide bombers are acting mainly out of a sense of duty (like kamikazes) rather than the insanity of ordinary suicides or a desire for rewards in the afterlife.
The book’s style is fairly dry and slow to read.
He sounds like one of the most objective voices on this subject, although his objectivity is hard to verify. He is so careful to minimize partisan comments that his index only lists one entry for George Bush and none for Clinton. One place where this disappoints me is when he reports that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from any country described by the U.S. State Department as sponsoring terrorism. Since this covers a period including nearly 4 years of Clinton’s term, it suggests that the problem of falsely connecting governments such as Saddam’s with al-Qaeda is a more pervasive problem than just one dishonest president (although the State Department used a broader definition of terrorism than the suicide terrorism that the book deals with). I’m disappointed that Pape doesn’t analyze this enough to determine how much of this problem preceded Bush.
His use of the word nationalism to describe al-Qaeda’s aims doesn’t sound quite right, but it is close to the territorial, tribalistic motives that his evidence points to.
It’s only in the last few pages when he departs from reporting research and recommends strategies that he becomes unconvincing. His support for a fence over all of the U.S. – Mexican border seems unrelated to the rest of the book. Does he think stopping people from carrying bombs across the border will help (i.e. that it would be hard for a terrorist to make or buy a weapon after crossing the border)? Or does he hope to stop terrorists from crossing the border (which his book implies would require turning away nearly everyone from Islamic countries with U.S.-backed governments)?
He says “the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is on the verge of world domination … is pure fantasy”. His book provides some evidence for that conclusion, but it involves extrapolating from a small sample of terrorist campaigns to conclude al-Qaeda will stop at achievable goals. I’m uncomfortable with the way he dismissed such an important source of disagreement with excessive confidence and with limited analysis. (I’m also annoyed that he exaggerates the degree of alarmism of his opponents).
Book review: Information Markets: A New Way of Making Decisions, edited by Robert Hahn and Paul Tetlock
This book contains some good discussions of current issues in the design of prediction markets (aka idea futures).
Since it’s the result of a conference for experts, it is mainly directed toward experts. It shouldn’t be overly hard for laymen to understand, but it probably focuses on issues that are somewhat different from what most laymen would find interesting, so I’d probably recommend reading Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds or some of Robin Hanson’s earlier papers on the subject first.
One surprising result reported here is that the Iowa Electronic Markets show no longshot bias, in contrast to similar markets on Tradesports/Intrade and to widespread types of sports betting. This looks like an important area for research, although that would probably require setting up many variations on those markets (varying things such as the user interface, commissions on trades, limits on how much money can be invested, etc.), which would be expensive and hindered by regulatory uncertainty.
Michael Abramowicz presents an interesting proposal to create incentives to counteract the likely tendency of markets such as prediction markets to discourage people from making public the knowledge that goes into making market prices efficient. I don’t have much of a guess about how well his solution will work. It needs some more thought about how vulnerable it is to manipulation of the intermediate prices used to reward traders who convince others to follow their reasoning (averaging prices over a week or two would be a simple start at deterring manipulation). But I think he understates the importance of the problems he’s trying to solve. He says “while they are endemic to all securities markets, they apparently cause little harm. They are likely to be much more severe, however, in markets with very few active participants.”. I suspect they are significant in most securities markets, and are underestimated because they are very hard to measure. As someone who trades stocks for a living, I’d say that the amount and quality of knowledge that is shared among traders is quite low compared to most professions, although it’s hard to say how much of this is due to desire to keep valuable information secret and how much is due to the difficulty of distinguishing valuable information from misleading information.
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