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Lloyd Garrison seemed to reject it, claiming the north would be a better haven for runaway slaves if it seceded and repealed the Fugitive Slave Law).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.
war
All posts tagged war
Jeff Hummel recently gave an interesting talk on the subject of how the law should treat a contract that involves one person becoming enslaved to another. The title made the talk sound like a quaint subject of little importance to present day politics, and I attended because Hummel has a reputation for being interesting, not due to the title of the talk. But his arguments were designed to apply not just to the status that was outlawed by the 13th amendment, but also to military service (not just the draft, but any type where the soldier can’t quit at will) and marriage.
Hummel argues that instead of asking whether slavery ought to be illegal, we should ask what a legal system ought to do when presented with a dispute between two people over enforcement of a contract requiring slavery.
Some simplistic notions of contracts assume that valid contracts should always be honored and enforced at all costs, but the term efficient breach describes exceptions to that rule (if you’re unfamiliar with this subject, I recommend David Friedman’s book Law’s Order as valuable background to this post).
In the distant past, people who failed to fulfill contracts and had insufficient assets to compensate were often put in debtors prisons. That was generally abolished around the time that traditional slavery was abolished, and replaced with a more forgiving bankruptcy procedure. Hummel suggests that this wasn’t a random coincidence, and that a slave breaching his promise to his master ought to be treated like most other breaches of contracts. If bankruptcy is the appropriate worst case result of a breach of contract, then the same reasoning ought to imply that bankruptcy is the worst result a legal system should impose on a person who reneges on a promise to be a slave.
Hummel noted that the change from debtors prisons to bankruptcy happened around the time that the industrial revolution took off, and suggested that we should wonder whether the timing implies that we became wealthy enough that we could afford to abolish debtors prisons, and/or whether the change helped to cause the industrial revolution. Neither he nor I have a good argument for or against those possibilities.
If this rule were applied to military service, unpopular wars would become harder to fight, as many more soldiers would quit the military. As far as I can tell, peer pressure kept soldiers fighting in any war I think they ought to have fought, so I think this would be a clear improvement.
The talk ended with some disagreement between Hummel and some audience members about what should happen if people want to have a legal system that provides harsher penalties for breach of contract (assume for simplicity that they’re forming a new country in order to do this). Hummel disapproved of this, but it wasn’t clear whether he was doing more than just predicting nobody would want this. I think he should have once again rephrased the question in terms of what existing legal systems should do about such a new legal system. Military/police action to stop the new legal system seems excessive. Social pressure for it to change seems desirable. It was unclear whether anyone there had an opinion about intermediate responses such as economic boycotts, or whether the apparent disagreement was just posturing.
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).
This rather discouraging blog post provides some unusual analogies to historical conflicts that might help predict what will happen in Iraq. The analogies aren’t exact enough to be convincing by themselves, but are close enough to deserve some attention.
Book review: Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War by Edward D. Mansfield
This book makes a convincing argument that it’s misleading to assume that democracies are less likely to wage wars. That assumption is true of mature democracies, but unstable nations that are trying to make a transition to democracy are more likely than autocracies to wage war. At least part of the reasons are increased nationalism, competition among politicians to be the most nationalist, and the weakness of stabilizing institutions.
The book offers some hints about how a transition to a democracy might be managed to minimize the risks, but this part of the book is more speculative and less convincing.
In spite of the book’s relevance to current events, it devotes little attention to the present. It covers the time period from the French revolution to the present with the perspective of a historian, and says as much about Iraq in 1948 as it does about the recent experiment with democracy in Iraq. It is somewhat valuable for reminding us how many attempts at democracy failed and have largely faded from collective memories.
The dry, scholarly style of the book is a bit mind-numbing.
Book Review: 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann
This book does a good job of discrediting several myths about the nature New World civilizations before Europeans arrived. It implies that significant parts of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel are wrong (in ways that Diamond should have avoided by consulting experts) – Indians were quite capable of repelling Europeans when their advantage consisted of guns and steel. After smallpox spread across the Americas (faster than Europeans), guns and steel were largely superfluous advantages.
The book presents evidence (alas, not enough to be conclusive) that most of the land in the Americas had been altered by civilizations that were much more sophisticated and varied than is commonly realized, and the myth that Indians were primitive savages is largely due to people mistaking the disease-ravaged remnants that the typical European colonist encountered for the pre-European norm.
The book also provides a few bits of evidence against historical determinism by pointing out how differently some aspects of civilization developed in the two worlds. For instance, the New World seems to have been first to get the concept of zero, but only used wheels for toys, and valued metals for their malleability rather than strength.
One very intriguing report is that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation society was freer and more egalitarian than European society, and that this caused a number of Europeans to prefer Haudenosaunee society, but no Indians in that region preferred European society. It’s unclear how strong the evidence is for these somewhat controversial claims. I guess I ought to track down the books he references for this subject.
The book also describes the Inka empire as socialist, without any markets, but I’m disappointed at how little the books says about that (e.g. how broad a definition of market is he using?).
The main shortcomings of this book are the numerous anecdotes that add little to our understanding of Indian civilizations.
The Bush administration’s abuse of innocent Muslims hasn’t been getting as much coverage as it deserves, so I’m encouraging you all to spread the word about this account of the government’s continuing abuse of Muslims that it admitted months ago were innocent (thanks to Andrew Sullivan).
What is Congress doing about this boost to Al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Trying to restrict the habeas corpus rights of the victims so that we don’t hear about them.
The cover describes Stratfor (the intelligence company Friedman founded) as a “Shadow CIA”. By this book’s description of the CIA, this implies it has a lot of details right but misses many important broad trends. The book tends to have weaknesses of this nature, being better as a history of Al Qaeda’s conflict with the U.S. than as a guide to the future, but it’s probably a good deal more reliable than CIA analysis.
It describes a few important trends that I wasn’t aware of. The best theory the book proposes that I hadn’t heard before is the claim that the U.S. government is much more worried about Al Qaeda getting a nuclear bomb than the public realizes (for instance, the Axis of Evil is the set of nations that are unable or unwilling to prove they won’t help Al Qaeda get the bomb).
The explanation of the U.S. motives for invading Iraq as primarily to pressure the Saudi government is unconvincing.
The book’s biases are sufficiently subtle that I have some difficulty detecting them. It often paints Bush in as favorable a light as possible, but is also filled with some harsh criticisms of his mistakes, for example:
It is an extraordinary fact that in the U.S.-jihadist war, the only senior commander or responsible civilian to have been effectively relieved was Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who was retired unceremoniously (although not ahead of schedule) after he accurately stated that more than 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq
The person selected, Tom Ridge, had no background in the field and had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but that was not a problem problem since, in fact, he would have nothing really to do. His job was simply to appear to be in control of an apparatus that did not yet exist
But it’s hard to place a lot of confidence in theories that are backed mainly by eloquent stories. It’s unfortunate that the book is unable or unwilling to document the evidence needed to confirm them.
There’s a fair amount of agreement between this book and Imperial Hubris, but I’ve revised my opinion of that book a bit due to the disagreements between the two. The claims by Imperial Hubris that we don’t need to worry about a new Caliphate seem unpersuasive now that I see there widespread disagreement with that claim and weak arguments on both sides. The two books disagree on who’s currently winning the war, but I see no sign that defeat for either side is anywhere near close enough to be predictable.
In today’s press conference, someone asked Bush about how the turnout in the Iraqi elections would affect their legitimacy. The questioner seemed think that a very high turnout (such as elections in the Soviet Union produced) would make the results legitimate, but low turnout (such as typical local elections here in Silicon Valley produce?) would raise questions about the election’s legitimacy. Why do suggestions such as that not produce ridicule? Is it due to a preference for easily quantified criteria?
A few minutes later, Bush took great care to avoid supporting free speech for Muslims who hate the U.S (he was asked about Jordan, but could easily have talked about other parts of the mideast). This hints at a willingness to prevent jihadists who seem to have support from a nontrivial fraction of the Iraqi population from campaigning, which might lend some plausibility to their boycott of the elections.
Another issue that is important in determining whether the elections are legitimate is whether there is any reason for one part of Iraq to be subject to the ideology of the majority within Iraq. Iraq is hardly a nation in the normal sense of that word – it contains several cultures, not fond of the idea of nation-states, who were made into a country by British decree.
If I had somehow become U.S. president around the time that Saddam was captured, I would have dispensed with recreating a national Iraqi government, and simply held hasty elections for ruling councils in each town/city, then I would have withdrawn U.S. troops.
Book review: Imperial Hubris : Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, by Anonymous
This disturbing book whose author has now identified himself as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, claims that bin Laden is being effective at persuading Muslims to wage a defensive jihad against the U.S. by making straightforward arguments based on scripture and descriptions of U.S. actions toward Muslims that are close enough to the truth to convince many Muslims that it would be sinful not to fight the U.S. He is succeeding because he ignores such U.S. offenses as alcohol, gay rights, man-made law and nation-states, and focuses on U.S. meddling in the Mideast.