Required reading for holier-than-thou environmentalists

In his excellent book, Whole Earth Discipine: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto, Stewart Brand puts into words what I've been thinking (less articulately) for a long time:

The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated -- too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem.

He follows with a trenchant observation that had not occurred to me:

Far from taking a new dominant role, environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system -- climate dynamics.

He also talks about

a plethora of environmental newsletters that purport to be scientific but actually [have] more in common with hardball politics

Yes. And more:

The real story of Prince William Sound is how resilient many natural systems are and how rapidly they bounce back when human pressure backs off even a little.

This part really resonated with me:

Scientists freely criticize each other ... but they are weirdly polite with environmentalists. It smells of condescension.

One last bit:

When environmentalists are wrong, it is frequently technology that they are wrong about, and they wind up supporting parochial Green goals at the cost of comprehensive ones.

Okay, this is really the last one:

The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong about what is going to happen. The boring expert who afflicts you with a cloud of howevers is probably right.

These quotes all come from Chapter 7 titled "Romantics, Scientists, Engineers." Read the whole chapter. Better yet, the whole book.

Food miles: a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator

Matt Ridley, on page 41 of The Rational Optimist:

Should we not protest T-shirt miles, too, and laptop miles? After all, fruit and vegetables account for more than 20 percent of all exports from poor countries, whereas most laptops come from rich countries, so singling out food imports for special discrimination means singling out poor countries for sanctions. Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is a 'profoundly flawed sustainability indicator'. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 percent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops. A New Zealand lamb, shipped to England, requires one-quarter as much carbon to get on to a London plate as a Welsh lamb; a Dutch rose, grown in a heated greenhouse and sold in London, has six times the carbon footprint of a Kenyan rose grown under the sun using water recycled through a fish farm, using geothermal electricity and providing employment to Kenyan women.

Ridley's book is terrific. Please buy a copy and read it. Or listen to the audio book, which is available at the BCPL. If you read it, join Phil Bowermaster's Facebook group Let's Get 1000 People to Read the Rational Optimist.

* Yes, We Have No Bananas: a Critique of the Food-Miles Perspective, by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. Mercatus Center, George Mason University.

See also Ron Bailey's The Food-Miles Mistake.

Christopher Hitchens's memoir

Two short chapters into Hitch-22, I like it a lot.

In so many biographies and memoirs, the early parts about parents are dull and shallow. In this book, they are entertaining and deep.

Four books that aren't gloomy enough about "sustainability" to be bestsellers

John Tierney via Muck & Mystery:

Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”? Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley.

Stewart Brand's new book

The book is highly recommended by a friend who has a nose for finding the best, most insightful books on whatever topic interests him at the moment. The title:

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

So far (three chapters in) it is excellent.

Excerpt from a 5-star review on Amazon (rated helpful by 48 of 48 people):

In these pages, Stewart Brand lays out a mind-blowing vision for the planet's salvation: migration to the cities, power generated by mini-nuclear reactors, healthier crops through genetic engineering.

This may well be the most important book I'll read this year. Certainly, it's the most aggressively optimistic book that's also closely reported --- Brand's a student who shows his work.

Also, the FT has a nice interview with Brand. I learned many new things about him: he served in the U.S. Army and also as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. And he has gear-head tendencies too. A well-rounded guy!

Recommended by Christopher Hitchens as "the great book" on the American Revolution

In an online interview, Hitchens is asked:

what historical figures, events, movements, or books do you feel have been ignored, or under emphasized, in the public education of young people?

His answer:

The founding of the United States and its emergence as "the world's first and only secular democratic federal republic" is terribly understudied these days.

He goes on:

the great book to read [on the topic] would be Theodore Draper's book Struggle for Power

via Reddit.com

If a DaVinci Code symbologist analyzed the cover art for the Danish cartoons book...

. . . he'd notice that the cover has a thought balloon on it, not a speech balloon. It's an apt way to symbolize Yale's censorship of Jytte Klausen. On the forlorn, empty cover she seems trapped speechless inside the balloon.

Here's my interpretation of the cover: the balloon represents the thinking of Klausen's readers. They are non-plussed as they consider her censored situation when they should be engrossed in the subject of the book itself: the Mohammad cartoons .

And here's an idea for the Yale Press: when the paperback comes out, change the balloon to a scream. It would represent the feelings of readers who believe the cartoons should never have been removed from the book.

Another disappointing aspect of this case: apparently many of those who argued for censorship had not read the book.

Related post here.

Characteristics of Alinsky's ideal community organizer

Here they are, as listed in Rules for Radicals:

1. Curiosity
2. Irreverence
3. Imagination
4. A sense of humor
5. A bit of a blurred vision of a better world
6. An organized personality
7. A well-integrated political schizoid
8. Ego [but not egotism]
9. A free and open mind and political relativity

Only a few of these require much explanation.

The "blurred vision of a better world" (#5) means the ability to see the whole picture of Alinsky's "better world" even when the organizer is immersed in--and working to organize--just a tiny part.

What he means by "integrated schizoid" in #7 is this:

. . . the organizer must split himself into two parts--one part in the arena of action where he polarizes the issue to 100 to nothing, and helps to lead his forces into conflict, while the other part knows that when the time comes for negotiations that it really is only a 10 percent difference--and yet both parts have to live comfortably with each other. Only a well-organized person can split and yet stay together. But this is what the organizer must do.

By "political relativity" in #9, Alinsky is referring to: (1) flexibility of personality, (2) rejection of ideology and dogma, (3) being comfortable with uncertainty, and (4) recognition that "all values are relative."

One thing that surprised me about Alinsky's thinking was his rejection of ideology and dogma, including socialism and Marxism.

Saul Alinsky's 11 rules on "the ethics of means and ends"

Alinsky's list of 13 tactics for community organizing have gotten more press lately, but his 11 rules on means and ends are just as thought-provoking:

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment
3. In war the ends justify almost any means
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally success or failure is a might determinant of ethics.
8. Morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

Alinky's intelligence, his pragmatism, and his impulse to describe things as they are remind me of Niccolo Machiavelli.

Source: Alinsky's 1971 book titled Rules for Radicals

On having your ideas attacked . . . clues that you're winning the debate . . . and the common fate of dissenters

In The Black Swan--which was published in 2007 and foreshadows/explains the economic meltdown of 2008--Nassim Nicholas Taleb has strong opinions about some well-known professors of finance & economics including Myron Scholes, Stephen Ross and Martin Shubik.

This bit is from page 280:

It was symptomatic that almost all people who attacked my thinking attacked a deformed version of it . . . . Some even had to change my biography. At a panel in Lugano, Myron Scholes once got in to a state of rage, and went after a transformed version of my ideas. I could see the pain in his face.

Once, in Paris, a prominent member of the mathematical establishment, who invested part of his lifeon some minute sub-sub-property of the Gaussian, blew a fuse--right when I showed empirical evidence of Black Swans in markets. He turned red with anger, had difficulty breathing, and started hurling insults at me for having descrated the institution, lacking pudeur (modesty); he shouted "I am a member of the Academy of Science!" to give more strength to his insults. (The French translation of my book was out of stock the next day.)

My best episode was with Steve Ross, an economist perceived to be an intellectual far superior to Scholes and Merton, and deemed a formidable debater, gave rebuttal to my ideas by signaling small errors or approximations in my presentation, such as Markowitz was not the first to ..." thus certifying that he had no answer to my main point.

Later (on page 283) Taleb points out that, as always, critics of conventional wisdom face plenty of hostility:

The insightful scholar Martin Shubik, who held that the degree of excessive abstraction of these models, a few steps beyond necessity, makes them totally unusable, found himself ostracized, a common fate for dissenters.

Funny & frightening

After hearing Ron Smith mention it many times, I finally got hold of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (the CD/audio version).

Although the book is pessimistic in many ways, it's written with humor and elegance. Taleb is blunt, but thoughtful and thorough too. He's original in his thinking and also in his writing style. He demonstrates a broad, deep and interconnected understanding of many subjects--from statistics and finance to literature and philosophy. He tells entertaining stories about dry topics. And he bridges the gap between academics and practitioners, apparently without breaking a sweat.

Wow!

And David Chandler did a terrific job reading it.

Highly recommended. Amazon reviews here.

Thank you Ron.

"Making gentlemen out of savages"

In his superb book Managing the Non-Profit Organization*, Peter Drucker talks about the Do's and Don'ts of writing mission statements.

One of our most common mistakes is to make the mission statement into a kind of hero sandwich of good intentions. It has to be simple and clear. As you add new tasks, you de-emphasize and get rid of old ones. You can only do so many things. Look at what we are trying to do in our colleges. The mission statement is confused - we are trying to do fifty different things. It won't work, and that's why the fundamentalist colleges attract so many young people. Their mission is very narrow. You and I may quarrel with it and say it's too narrow, but it's clear.

One example Drucker seemed to like:

Arnold of Rugby, the greatest English educator of the nineteenth century, who
created the English public school, defined its mission as making gentlemen out of savages.

Compare this to the BCPS mission statement, which is too long for my taste and comes too close to the problematic "hero sandwich":

... provide a quality education that develops the content[,] knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will enable all students to reach their maximum potential as responsible, life-long learners and productive citizens.

For good measure, here's the "vision" statement that BCPS came up with:

Baltimore County Public Schools’ graduates will have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to reach their potential as responsible, productive citizens in a global economy and multicultural society.

*If you can find it, listen to the audio version. His rumbly Viennese accent is soothing and inspiring, and his personality shines through.

Shelby Steele on why people change

Something about this phrase (at 5:00 min) stopped me short, in a good way:

People don't change because the government intervenes with a social program. People change when they become exhausted with their suffering.

Despite the subtitle, his book on Obama is well worth reading today.

For my "to read" list: "Searching for Safety"

It's by Aaron Wildavsky.

John Stossel recommends it in this interview. Years ago I read a wonderful book on Stossel's recommendation. It's called In Pursuit: of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray.

Books I'd like to read: an Edmund Burke bio by Conor Cruise O'Brien

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmunde Burke.

via Peggy Noonan, who says it is "great".

Another of her recommendations:

A true delight was “The Blair Years,” Alastair Campbell’s memoir of his service with Tony Blair. No modern American political operative would write, or could write, a book as truthful, half crazy and irreverent as this one. It is a small classic, as is its more magisterial counterpart, “Counselor” by Ted Sorensen

Amity Shlaes on the Great Depression: "Government made it worse"

Peter Robinson interviews her for the Uncommon Knowledge series. She talks about her new book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

In the interview, she finds fault with both Hoover and Roosevelt, and does it in an engaging and convincing way.

10 Insightful Web 2.0 books

Compliments of Ed Cone. Via Glenn.

Books I'd like to read: "Stealing Elections" by John Fund

From an Amazon review of Stealing Elections:

I was hooked from page one ...

Fund chronicles a rash of voter scandals from across the country ...

Funds [looks at electoral law through Thomas Sowell's lens of] competing visions of human nature ...

One need not be a member of a particular party to appreciate [the arguments in] the book ...

Fund provide[s] some key insights into what really happened in Florida once the dust settled [after the Bush-Gore election of 2000] ...

Fund discusses [...] recent election reforms prompted by the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)

Fund is a clear, level-headed thinker. He also wrote a good series of articles a few years ago about the Yale Taliban.

"Aggressive benificence"

Definition: "[interfering when one] might have more productively left things, or people, alone."

A useful phrase. I ran across it this weekend in a a Jane Smiley novel (p. 208).

How not to interview an author

On BloggingHeadsTV, Jim Holt gives a textbook example. As the interviewer, you're supposed to be the showcase, not the show. Holt asks rambling questions, monopolizes the conversation, and steals the author's thunder.

To see author interviews done right, watch anything done by Brian Lamb on C-Span's BookNotes. Or listen to the Glenn & Helen Show.

By the way, the book is Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). The author is Tom Vanderbilt. Hard to tell from the interview, but I'm guessing it's very good.

As for BloggingHeadsTV, check it out. My favorite regulars are Mickey Kaus!/Robert Wright, and John McWhorter/Glenn Loury.