“A Long Saturday” by George Steiner with Laure Adler

This is a short collection of interviews with the polymath Cambridge professor. Steiner is insightfully provocative with almost every word. As a European Jewish polyglot, forced to flee one home after another because of World War II, he abhors all tribalism and nationalism. “I believe that the Jew has a task: to be a pilgrim of invitations. To be everywhere a guest in order to try, very slowly, within the limits of our means, to make others understand that we are all guests on this Earth. To teach our fellow citizens in life that the art of being home everywhere, difficult as it may be, is essential. And to contribute to every community where we are invited to stay…. I believe neither in passports- ridiculous things- nor in flags. I believe strongly in the advantages of encountering the new.” On languages and literary works he meanders, “the death of a language is the death of a universe of possibilities…. When you and I are talking, we are constantly translating things within the same language: we are trying to understand each other. No one uses the same words in exactly the same way. There are as many words as there are human beings…. Every poem is a struggle with the word…. A great work is one that always, mysteriously, tells the reader at the end, “You must begin again. This was the first try. Let’s try again.”… We know nothing of the billions of thoughts that have been lost forever for lack of means of expression…. A book, a piece of music, or a painting says to me, “Change your life! Take me seriously. I’m not here to make your life easier.”… Common sense is the very enemy of genius. Common sense is what weakens irrationality, arrogance.” As a Jew, I was surprised to hear that Steiner reads Heidegger daily. “He believed in the renewal of Germany, and saw in Nazism the only potential movement he thought could resist the “two huge threats” of American capitalism and Russian communism. In my opinion, it was a stroke of genius to have understood long before anyone else that technology was the crux in both cases, and that American technocratic capitalism and Leninism/Stalinism were much closer to each other than they were to the classical spirit of Europe.” Although an atheist, Steiner has a healthy respect for religion and even regrets a world descending into secularism. “But a civilization without the possibility of transcendence- what Nietzsche calls the mysterium tremendum of man, what Heidegger (with caution) attempts to formulate- a civilization in which we can no longer say, like Wittgenstein, “If I could have, I would have dedicated my philosophical inquiries to God,” a civilization that has lost those possibilities is certainly, in my opinion, in serious danger…. If what Dostoyevsky calls “the only question” (that of the existence or nonexistence of God) isn’t worth considering anymore or we stop attempting to find formal metaphors to express it, then I believe we are entering what I call an epilogue, something that comes after the word, the logos. “In the beginning was the word.” Maybe at the end is derision.”

“Everybody Lies- Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, who has made his name analyzing Big Data and extrapolating interesting trends. He mainly uses Google’s data, particularly Google Trends and Google AdWords, to tease out statistics that differ from the information people give to pollsters or use in polite conversation. In Google searches, unlike polls, people have the incentive to tell the truth, in addition to the anonymity. Stephens-Davidowitz goes so far as to suggest “Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.” However, he cautions to not be overly impressed by the size of a given dataset. After all, “the bigger an effect, the fewer the number of observations necessary to see it.” Enormous piles of data require a scientist to tease out what is of most interest. “Frequently, the value of Big Data is not its size; it’s that it can offer you new kinds of information to study- information that had never previously been collected…. If you are going to try to use new data to revolutionize a field, it is best to go into a field where old methods are lousy.” That is why more trends are being found in medicine and education than for stocks on Wall St. Often times, for commercial success, weak causation or even just correlation is all that you need. Trend spotters are “in the prediction business, not the explanation business…. When trying to make predictions, you needn’t worry too much about why your models work.” Much of the work is just in considering what piles of data are worth further analysis. “You have to be open and flexible in determining what counts as data…. Consider nontraditional sources of data.” 

These days a doppelgänger search algorithm is considered the preeminent way to accurately predict. “For a doppelgänger search to be truly accurate, you don’t want to find someone who merely likes the same things you like. You also want to find someone who dislikes the things you dislike…. Amazon uses something like a doppelgänger search to suggest what books you might like. They see what people similar to you select and base their recommendations on that. Pandora does the same in picking what songs you might want to listen to. And this is how Netflix figures out the movies you might like.” When Netflix switched to making suggestions based on their doppelgänger algorithm, as opposed to suggestions from customers’ own movie queues, clicks and return visits to their site increased exponentially. The other revolution in Big Data was the proliferation of randomized controlled experiments or A/B testing. “Facebook now runs a thousand A/B tests per day, which means that a small number of engineers at Facebook start more randomized, controlled experiments in a given day than the entire pharmaceutical industry starts in a year.” This can also be done using natural experiments via regression discontinuity. “Anytime there is a precise number that divides people into two different groups- a discontinuity- economists can compare- or regress- the outcomes of people very, very close to the cutoff.” The biggest worry with Big Data is that there is too much of it. “If you test enough things, just by random chance, one of them will be statistically significant…. The more variables you try, the more humble you have to be. The more variables you try, the tougher the out-of-sample test has to be. It is also crucial to keep track of every test you attempt.” Another problem is the so-called lamppost fallacy. Just because it is important does not mean there is data for it. And just because there is data for it, does not mean it is important. “The things we can measure are often not exactly what we care about.”

So what are some of the most interesting trends teased out from Big Data? Strawberry Pop-Tarts sell seven times faster than in normal days leading up to a hurricane. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for “nigger.” Having a core common group of Facebook friends with your romantic other is a strong predictor that your relationship will not last. Better socioeconomic status means a higher chance of making it to the NBA. The Google search most correlated with the national unemployment rate between 2004 and 2011 was the term “Slutload.” The size of the left ventricle of a horse’s heart is a massive predictor of its racing success. A man who searches for “Judy Garland” is three times more likely to search for gay than straight porn. Among women, “gay” is 10 percent more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband…” than the second-place word, “cheating.” The States with the highest percentage of women asking this are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in twenty-one of the twenty-five states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average. Penn State students who were admitted to Harvard have the same career incomes as Harvard graduates. Similarly, students who just missed the admittance cutoff for Stuyvesant High School in New York City by a question or two have indistinguishable SAT and AP scores from those who were barely admitted.

“At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails” by Sarah Bakewell

This is a biography of an idea at its best. Bakewell explores the origins of existentialism tracing its roots from German phenomenology. Heidegger’s turn from protege to nemesis of the philosophical giant Husserl is depicted as a battle both of the idea of Being and the nature of what philosophy is about or should be about, in general. There is a copious amount of historical context, as no one can escape the backdrop of the two great European Wars and, particularly, Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies and what that meant for the many Jewish philosophers in his milieu. The book, however, appropriately focuses on Sartre and Beauvoir as anchors who wrestle with what it means to be human, the dialectics between master and slave, subject and object, I and you, and man and woman, what it means to live authentically, consciousness, what freedom is, what art is, as well as the role of contingency in every single life. Camus makes multiple appearances, but more as a foil to the genius rockstar philosopher Sartre. This is a shame, but in a brief overview of an entire movement, understandable. Existentialism “acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.”

“The Evolution of Everything” by Mathew Ridley

Ridley’s premise is that although Darwin’s theory of evolution was particular to biology, evolution is a more basic mechanism. In fact, improvement by evolution has been the general course of affairs throughout human history. Ridley spans the globe, time, and fields- from economics, technology, sexual relations, religion, social structures, astronomy, to politics showing evolution’s pervasiveness. Although he does not discount human agency, he implies that human improvement never depends on any one particular individual. Inventions come when the time is ripe and are often independently arrived at by multiple people, in short order. Ridley’s take is that the greatest advances of mankind have been bottom up, rather than topdown affairs: every great man has stood on the shoulders of previous giants.

“The Roots of Romanticism” by Isaiah Berlin

In this short collection of essays Berlin ponders the precursors to Romanticism, its ideals, and its lasting influence. He starts by admitting that any all-encompassing idea of Romanticism is hard to pin down. Many historians agree that it “was a passionate protest against universality of any kind.” Berlin goes on, “the values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king, or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far  from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath of your body, and you would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in a philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is prepared not to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes it- this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.” That was the worldview that most readily encompassed Romanticism. The Romantics cared more about the motives of an act than its consequences. The movement was anti-Enlightenment in the sense that Romantics did not think that all virtue was encapsulated in knowledge. It was a movement opposed to compromise of all kinds, but most importantly compromising the ideals within yourself. All virtues were not compatible. There were opposing ultimate values in the world, each equally valuable, which could not be reconciled. This was true as much for aesthetics as for morality. There was no universal pattern or platonic ideal. “The notion that the purpose of art is to give pleasure to a large number of persons, or even to a small number of trained cognoscenti, is not valid. The purpose of art is to produce beauty, and if the artist alone perceives that his object is beautiful, that is a sufficient end in life.” 

Montesquieu, with his cultural pluralism, and Hume, by placing belief before reason, started to poke holes in the Enlightenment edifice, despite being solid sons of that movement. The Pietists that rebelled against Frederick the Great’s German reforms tried to smash the very ground that the Enlightenment rested upon. “General propositions were baskets of an extremely crude kind…. What they left out, of necessity, because they were general, was that which was unique, that which was particular, that which was the specific property of this particular man, or this particular thing. And that alone was of interest…. What men wanted was for all their faculties to lay in the richest and most violent possible fashion. What men wanted was to create, what men wanted was to make, and if this making led to clashes, if it led to wars, if it led to struggles, then this was part of the human lot…. Creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalysable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle…. For them a work of art is the expression of somebody, it is always a voice speaking. A work of art is the voice of one man addressing himself to other men.” That was the essence of Pietist philosophy as espoused by Lutheran Germans like Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder “disliked every form of violence, coercion and the swallowing of one culture by another, because he wants everything to be what it is as much as it possibly can…. He is the originator of all those antiquarians who want natives to remain as native as possible, who like arts and crafts, who detest standardization- everyone who likes the quaint, people who wish to preserve the most exquisite forms of old provincialism without impingement on it of some hideous metropolitan uniformity…. If variety and difference are not merely a fact of the world but a splendid fact, which is what he thought it to be, arguing for the variety of the imagination of the creator and the splendour of human creative powers, and the infinite possibilities still before mankind, and the unfulfillability of human ambitions, and the general excitement of living in a world in which nothing can ever be fully exhausted- if that is the image, then the notion of a final answer to the question of how to live becomes absolutely meaningless…. That is to say, he is one of the fathers of the movement whose characteristic attributes include the denial of unity, the denial of harmony, the denial of the compatibility of ideals, whether in the sphere of action or in the sphere of thought.”

It is ironic that Kant is considered a progenitor of the Romantic movement, as he despised Romanticism. “He detested every form of extravagance, fantasy, what he called Schwarmerei (fanatical gush), any form of exaggeration, mysticism, vagueness, confusion.” He was firmly in the camp of science and reason, as espoused by the Enlightenment ideals. However, Kant also firmly stood for human freedom. He believed that morality was impossible without freedom of choice. “Man is man, for Kant, only because he chooses.” This is what distinguishes man from mere objects and beasts. “The will is that which enables men to choose either good or evil, either right or wrong. There is no merit in choosing what is right unless it is possible to choose what is wrong…. Kant supposed the whole notion of moral merit, the whole notion of moral desert, the whole notion which is entailed by the fact that we praise and we blame, that we consider that human beings are to be congratulated or condemned for acting in this or that way, presupposes the fact that they are able to freely choose.” This is Kant’s first categorical imperative. “Any kind of use of other people for purposes which are not these other people’s, but one’s own, seems to him to be a form of degradation imposed by one man on another, some form of hideous maiming of other people, of removal from them of that which distinguishes them as men, namely their self-determining liberty.” That is Kant’s second categorical imperative. “A value is made a value- at least a duty, a goal transcending desire and inclination, is so made- by human choice and not by some intrinsic quality in itself, out there. Values are not stars in some moral heaven, they are internal, they are what human beings freely choose to live for, to fight for, to die for. That is Kant’s fundamental sermon.” And that is the essence of what the Romantics took from Kant’s philosophy. Either there is human agency in the world or you are a slave with no free will, compelled by causes and powers beyond your control. “If man is part of nature, then he is determined, and morality is a hideous illusion…. When he is at his freest, when he is at his most human, when he rises to his noblest heights, then he dominates nature, that is to say he moulds her, he breaks her, he imposes his personality upon her, he does that which he chooses.” All authority, whether it be nature, or government, or parents, or traditions cannot be accepted simply because it is authority. That kind of simplicity and abrogation of responsibility revolted Kant. His morality was firmly anti-authoritarian. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte would take Kant’s inclinations and run with them. In their stories, heroic men “die uselessly because they belong to a society which is incapable of making use of them; they are superfluous persons; they are superfluous because their morality, which is a morality superior, we are meant to understand, to that of society around them, has no opportunity of asserting itself against the fearful opposition offered by the philistines, the slaves, the heteronomous creatures of the society in which they live.” Fichte admitted, “at the mere mention of the name “freedom” my heart opens and flowers, while at the word “necessity” it contracts painfully.” Later, he continues, “we do not act because we know, we know because we are called upon to act…. I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will…. I am not determined by ends, ends are determined by me.” The dramatist Ernst Raupach sums up the milieu of this German school, “to be free is nothing, to become free is very heaven.”

The Romantics embraced the idea that life is in the action- that it is the striving and yearning which makes the man. “For these Romantics, to live is to do something, to do is to express your nature. To express your nature is to express your relation to the universe. Your relation to the universe is inexpressible, but you must nevertheless express it.” It is in the doing that we live our lives. “There must be a field for action. The potential is more real than the actual. What is made is dead. Once you have constructed a work of art, abandon it, because once it is constructed it is there, it is done for, it is last year’s calendar. What is made, what has been constructed, what has been already understood must be abandoned. Glimpses, fragments, intimations, mystical illumination- that is the only way to seize reality.” Berlin sums up the ethos of the Romantics in two features. “These two elements- the free untrammeled will and the denial of the fact that there is a nature of things, the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything- are the deepest and in a sense the most insane elements in this extremely valuable and important movement…. Those are the fundamental bases of Romanticism: will, the fact that there is no structure to things, that you can mould things as you will- they come into being only as a result of your moulding activity- and therefore opposition to any view which tried to represent reality as having some kind of form which could be studied, written down, learnt, communicated to others, and in other respects treated in a scientific manner.” The Romantics were opposed to any inclination of natural laws, as all law was a human construct. Politics and economics were not unalterable, just as poverty and squalor were not a given. Chateaubriand describes the Romantic ideal, “the Ancients scarcely knew this secret anxiety, the bitterness of strangled passions, all fermenting together. A large political life, games in the gymnasium or on the field of Mars, the business of the Forum- public business- filled their time and left no place for the ennui of the heart.” Byron was perhaps the epitome of the Romantic. “Byron’s chief emphasis is upon the indomitable will, and the whole philosophy of voluntarism, the whole philosophy of the view that there is a world which must be subdued and subjugated by superior persons, takes his rise from him.” This insatiable desire was also expressed by Schopenhauer and Wagner. It was expressed in the idea of irreconcilable ultimate values and unattainable ends. It was expressed in the ideal of the noble savage. It was equally expressed in the ideal of the superior man stuck amongst mere mortals who make up society. “This is the typical note of the outcast, the exile, the superman, the man who cannot put up with the existing world because his soul is too large to contain it, because he has ideals which presuppose the necessity for perpetual fervent movement forward, movement which is constantly confined by the stupidity and the unimaginativeness and flatness of the existing world…. The fact that he is sincere, that he’s prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is a morally noble fact. Anyone who is sufficiently a man of integrity, anyone who is prepared to sacrifice himself upon any altar, no matter what, has a moral personality worthy of respect, no matter how detestable or how false the ideals to which he bows his knee.” This notion of idealism was invented by the Romantics. “What Romanticism did was to undermine the notion that in matters of value, politics, morals, aesthetics there are such things as objective criteria which operate between human beings…. The notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect or true- all this we owe to the Romantics.”

“The Dream of Enlightenment” by Anthony Gottlieb

This book is an entertaining summation of some of the most important Enlightenment philosophers. It was written by a former Economist editor, not an academic, and the breezy style shows through. This is not a criticism, however. In fact, some of the asides in and of themselves would make the book worth reading. Where else would you learn that Descartes carried around a life-sized mechanical doll that was the spitting image of his illegitimate daughter? It makes the fact that the townspeople of  Amsterdam would set their watches by his regular walks seem almost banal. Hobbes was far from confident about his theory of Leviathan, “either I alone am insane, or I alone am sane. There is no third alternative, unless, as someone might say, we are all insane.” Spinoza did not think of himself as an atheist or a pantheist, despite being branded both by his synagogue upon excommunication, “I do not differentiate between God and Nature in the way all those known to me have done.” Locke was the inspiration behind Jefferson’s famous line in the Declaration of Independence, “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone…. Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” Bayle argued forcefully not just for Christians dissenting from the Anglican Church, but for Catholics, Muslims, pantheists, and even atheists, “a sincere heretic, even an infidel” should not suffer as long as their beliefs are honest. Leibniz discovered calculus before Newton, invented the binary code still used in computer programming, created a cipher machine, discovered a desalination process, drew up diagrams for a submarine, but perhaps his most creative invention were “spring-loaded shoes with which to escape from pursuers.” He also thought the Chinese were proto-Christians, that the I-Ching encoded the Genesis myth, and that “the Chinese scholars speak neither of Hell nor purgatory [still] it is possible that some among them believe or have believed at other times that the wandering souls which prowl here and there in the mountains and forests are in a sort of purgatory.” Hume would have written more philosophy and history, but for the fact that, as he told his publisher, he was “too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich.” Rousseau, apparently, had a good estimation of his own personality, “I have never really been suited to civil society, where there is nothing but irritation, obligation, and duty, and…. my independent nature always made me incapable of the constraints required of anyone who wants to live with men.” Finally, despite Voltaire being placed in the French Pantheon by the revolutionaries, he held a fairly dim view of the democratic spirit, “enlightened times will enlighten only a small number of honest people. The vulgar masses will always be fanatics.” If you want a more scholarly (if biased) overview of the Enlightenment thinkers you should peruse Bertrand Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy”, but for an entertaining and quick read on some of philosophy’s greatest minds Gottlieb’s book will do nicely.

“Melancholy” by Laszlo Foldenyi

The ancient Greek word melancholia literally means black bile. Aristotle posed the question, “why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?” A melancholic “perceives the order of the cosmos by constantly violating it.” At their heights and their depths they are never average. Foldenvi begins his inquiry with mythological melancholics: Ajax, Bellerophon, and Heracles. Bellerophon “speaks of those who suffer the fate of humans, who live a double life: a life of suffering and a life of awareness of such suffering.” The melancholic is a prophet, a seer, a madman, a philosopher living beyond time and space. He is also, of necessity, a misanthrope. “This outcast state is dual: not only are they excluded from the world of others, but they must also step outside of themselves. On that account, their knowledge is not uplifting but disheartening, depressing; they are incapable of living like others- since they see everything, they also cannot forget.” 

During the Middle Ages excessively ponderous thoughts came to be thought of as the cause rather than an effect of melancholy. “Melancholia no longer led toward an understanding of the deepest problems of existence, but became a concomitant of vain and fruitless speculation.” According to Constantine the African, a melancholic is “convinced of the fearfulness and horror of things that are not to be feared, thinks about the kinds of things it is unnecessary to reflect on, and perceives things that do not exist.” In ancient Greece the melancholic was above the fray, apart from society. By the Middle Ages he was condemned to be against society because he had turned away from God. “A melancholic wishes, first and foremost, to escape from himself, but he can find no crack in the homogenous, overarching culture, and resignation grows in him, together with a sense of helplessness.” Still, a running theme was the overriding fear of death while fearing life as well. “The sadness that melancholics feel on account of their being destined for death, the extinction of their unrepeatable earthly existence, even though they feel that earthly existence to be unbearable…. Their mournfulness and despair relate not to one or another, possibly adjustable or rectifiable, form or manifestation of human contact or institution, but to existence in general, and therefore they are not pinning their hopes on any remedy. ”

In the modern world melancholy has been accepted. Society no longer looks down upon melancholia as deviant. Indeed, society views it as a temporary condition, a state of mind or affairs, which for some is all-encompassing, yet still a mood. “Sadness was bribery…. [Melancholics] did not see that sadness was the world’s reward to them for giving up their muddling of the world…. Forgoing absolute autonomy and conforming to the given world, he could regard his own existence as sensible or senseless only on the basis of existing standards.” Yet, “depression is describable by its symptoms, while melancholia is at best only interpretable.” The conundrum, of course, is that “nothing disturbs a melancholic more than if we try to console him, or even just define his condition, with words.” Foldenyi suggests as basic symptoms “the touchstones of modern melancholia: metaphysical solitude, a compulsion for self-justification, suffering in self-enjoyment, a death wish merging into a fear of death, and a condition bordering on genius.” There was a focal point on death, both a fear of it and an impatience for it. “It is not a matter of being bored with this thing or that but of unending boredom with existence itself.” The external was ephemeral, subjective, and illusory, while the internal was burdensome. “The world itself was the main barrier to a true life, so they created a new world within the boundaries of the soul.” However, if the turn inward was painful, it was also the only thing that was true. “Being aware of the uniqueness and irreproducibility of an individual being, they found it ludicrous to refer to human communities. Without batting an eye, they accepted that they could count only on themselves, and therefore they seemed reckless- assuming that one perceives recklessness not just in the physical sense (for example, leaping across a crevasse) but also in an intellectual sense (for example, thinking fully through a hitherto-inconceivable thought for the first time.)”

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari

There was a time when many species among the genus homo (humans) walked the Earth together. Somehow, homo sapiens out competed them all and drove every other one into extinction. Neanderthals, for one, had bigger brains, larger muscles, and could withstand much colder temperatures than sapiens, yet bands of sapiens gradually encroached on and eventually settled in all their territories and hunting grounds. It was through the ability to cooperate in large social units that sapiens succeeded. Sapiens are united by shared myths and stories. Such common fictions still in use today consist of religion, the nation-state, fiat money, and the corporation. These are jointly defined intangible concepts accepted by mutual recognition. Language and writing were other advances sapiens used to transcend the limits of biology. By using writing, sapiens were able to push the boundaries of memory, time, and physical space beyond the confines of the biological unit. The cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and finally the technological/digital revolution followed apace. This is a sweeping book that seeks to explain how exactly homo sapiens grew from humble origins to become the rulers of the entire globe.

“The Rise and Fall of American Growth” by Robert Gordon

This is the last 700 page economics book I plan to read for the foreseeable future. I find the marginal return on this type of undertaking to be diminishing. That said, this book reads more like the history of the industrialization of America than pure economics (in a good way). Gordon sees the century between 1870 and 1970 as a unique period of growth. During that time there were numerous inventions, that could only occur once in history, that made the lives of innumerable Americans better. Furthermore, these innovations cannot be accurately assessed by modern techniques like GDP, both because qualitative differences are hard to quantify and compare across time and because some measurables such as health and life expectancy are not explicitly measured in standard economic terms. 

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is the portion of output not explained by the amount of inputs used in production. As such, its level is determined by how efficiently and intensely the inputs are utilized in production. TFP growth is usually measured by the Solow residual. Gordon seeks to explain how TFP grew so rapidly during this period and why it has stagnated since. He breaks the book up between the periods of 1870-1940 and 1940-1970. He emphasizes the invention of department stores and mail-order catalogues, where for the first time one could buy pre-made clothes for one standard advertised price, grocery stores, where a variety of foods, particularly canned, could supplement home grown produce, electricity spreading into businesses and homes, along with running water, washing machines, refrigerators, toilets, and plumbing. Transportation was transformed again and again- from horse drawn buggies to railways, omnibuses, street cars, then automobiles. With transport vehicles came a network of rails then roads to connect the entire nation. Communication was rapidly transformed from the availability of daily newspapers and magazines like Life and Time for the masses, to telegraphs, and then the telephone, first only for businesses, then to every home, first through the party line system. Entertainment also changed with the advent of radio, the movie house, and eventually television. This entertainment was not just pure pleasure, but had a unifying effect on the whole population. From the Seabiscuit horse race and Edward Murrow’s reports from Europe to Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, for the first time, every American could instantaneously listen to the same piece of news and discuss it at work the next day. 

The quantity and quality of life improvements are harder to measure accurately. Gordon points to growing life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, fewer infectious diseases, and the professionalization of doctors and medical advice. In terms of quality of life, he points to less hours worked per week, less death and accidents on the job and, in general, less brutal manual labor, less hours women had to work at home doing chores like washing clothes, emptying chamberpots, and lighting fires, and less child labor and the resulting furthering of their secondary education. 

Gordon makes the case that this century of record TFP growth is something we are unlikely to ever see again, not because Americans have gotten too rich, too lazy, or less inventive, but because we have picked all the low hanging fruit. Electricity and the internal combustion engine were general inventions that were then tinkered with and improved, built upon and combined with other inventions, and thus their gains pushed out over the course of decades, before eventually subsiding. These were inventions that transformed humanity once and never again.

“On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored” by Adam Phillips

Phillips, in this collection of essays, attempts to examine the “unexamined” life through modern psychoanalysis. It is Freud for the 21st century. He looks beneath the surface at commonplace occurrences within the human experience, from the frivolous to the significant. In “On Tickling” he posits that tickling is such an exclusive sensation because “the child who will be able to feed himself, the child who will masturbate, will never be able to tickle himself.” In “On Risk and Solitude” he discusses going to and over the edge to see what we truly desire, “we create risk when we endanger something we value, whenever we test the relationship between thrills and virtues. So to understand, or make conscious, what constitutes a risk for us- our own personal repertoire of risks- is an important clue about what it is that we do value.” Some essays delve into his actual clinical cases, while others meander around everyday themes. A few essays expound upon the previous work of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, while most do not include any formal psychoanalytic babble at all. All the essays, however, have the clinical method lurking somewhere in the background. After all, for Phillips “psychoanalysis is a story- and a way of telling stories- that makes some people feel better… Psychoanalysis in this version cannot help people, because there is nothing wrong with anybody; it can only engage them in useful and interesting conversations.”

“Conversations- Volume 1” with Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari (translated by Jason Wilson)

Borges never wrote a piece of fiction or poetry beyond twenty pages. These transcribed radio conversations show that he could still pack a lot of weight into just a few words. The topics range from his literary friends (and enemies), to travel, to what it means to be Argentinian and/or South American, to the meaning of dreams, to going blind, to Dante, to Melville, and beyond. Each self-contained broadcast is a joy in and of itself, but the collection shows the width and depth of Borges’ knowledge, while being relayed in his unique brand of ironic humor. Ferrari more than holds his own in the exchange of banter and pushes Borges both where he does and where he does not want to go. Although recorded in the 1980s, the themes and commentaries still ring relevant in today’s literary scene and geopolitical climate.

“Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” by Gary Kasparov

This is a memoir of Kasparov’s interactions with computer chess programs, culminating most famously with his two battles with IBM’s Deep Blue. In relating the tale, however, Kasparov also covers the history of the decades long effort to make an adequate chess playing computer program in general, as well as the history of artificial intelligence more broadly. For chess fans to hear the thoughts and recollections of one of history’s greatest players is invaluable and utterly enjoyable. Kasparov sprinkles insights and tips throughout the way. He points out that computer chess programs, from their inception, have played a distinctly “computer-style” of the game. That is not a bad thing, necessarily. “We confuse performance- the ability of a machine to replicate or surpass the results of a human- with method, how those results are achieved…. Machines don’t need to do things the same way the natural world does in order to be useful, or to surpass nature.” Chess computers eventually became successful not by trying to replicate the human mind, but through brute strength and blazing speed. One breakthrough was “the “minimax” algorithm, which originated in game theory and has been applied to logical decision making in many fields. Very simply put, a minimax system evaluates possibilities and sorts them from best to worst.” It evaluates every single possible move anew with each turn and ranks them in order. A huge advance then came with “the “alpha-beta” algorithm [that] allowed the programs to rapidly prune out weak moves and thus to see further ahead, faster.” All modern chess programs use alpha-beta pruning, combined with minimax concepts. Humans play chess very differently. “Outside of the opening sequences that are indeed memorized, strong human players don’t rely on recall as much as on a super-fast analogy engine…. Disregarding forced moves, each position will have three or four plausible moves, sometimes as many as ten or so. Again, before any real search begins in my mind, I have selected several to analyze more deeply, what we call candidate moves.” A machine does none of this pre-sorting. It looks at every single possible move and chooses the best one through the brute force of its algorithm. “The total number of legal positions in a game of chess are comparable to the number of atoms in our solar system.” Chess programs are very good at tactics based on the inputs of the value of pieces. “The basic set of values was established two centuries ago: pawns are worth one; knights and bishops are worth three; rooks are worth five; the queen is worth nine…. One trick is to assign the king a value of one million so the program knows not to put it in danger.” Computers are not good at deeper strategy beyond that. They cannot create plans because they reevaluate the board fresh with every move. “After the material value of the pieces and pawns, you have more abstract knowledge such as which player controls more space on the board, the structure of the pawns, and king safety…. Computers are very good as chess calculation, which is the part humans have the most trouble with. Computers are poor at recognizing patterns and making analogical evaluations, a human strength…. Computers are very good at sharp tactics in complex positions while that is a human’s greatest weakness. Humans are very good at planning and what we call “positional play,” the strategic and structural considerations and quiet maneuvering.” Kasparov would first beat Deep Blue, only to lose the more remembered rematch in 1997, the first time a computer had beaten a current world champion in match play. It was also the first chess match Kasparov had lost playing with standard rules to anyone. In creating Deep Blue, however, IBM had created a machine specifically designed to play chess (and some would say specifically to beat Gary Kasparov). It had inputed every single game he had ever played, every opening, every defense, and then recruited the world’s best current grand masters to input their best countermeasures to all of Kasparov’s favorite plays. They had inputed every “opening book” move for beyond fifteen moves for all of the known chess game beginnings in the history of chess. Then they had worked backwards from mate to create inputs that memorized end of game scenarios for up to six pieces on the board. Computers were already considered superior to humans in the so-called middle game and so IBM has sought to fix its most glaring weaknesses through sheer memory. Deep Blue was not a thinking machine, but an extremely impressive databank of all of the greatest games and individual moves in the history of chess. In the end, chess programs were of relatively little use to furthering the development of AI. It is not clear what, if any, intelligence they actually exhibited. It would take the deep learning methods of AlphaGo to stretch the boundaries of machine thought. The key was the explosion of data, along with exponential processing speed improvements. “Instead of telling it a process, you provide it with lots of examples of that process and let the machine figure out the rules, so to speak…. Errors are reduced by quantity leading to quality, keeping the good examples and discarding the bad a billion times per second…. It uses machine learning and neural networks to teach itself how to play better, as well as other sophisticated techniques beyond the usual alpha-beta search. Deep Blue was the end; AlphaGo is a beginning.”

“Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist” by Niall Ferguson

This first volume of this complicated man’s life is the gold standard for biography. At almost 900 pages it better be. Besides public records and newly declassified archives, particularly from (North) Vietnam, Ferguson had access to a lifetime of private letters, memos, and notes, as well as interviews with Kissinger himself. And the tome still ends before the Nixon Presidency gets started, going heavy into the minutia of Kissinger’s early life. At the same time, it uses his personal life to retell the history of the world at large- a history that as Kissinger aged would turn him from observer, to participant, to molder. The book begins with Kissinger’s childhood in Germany and his move to New York City- how his life was shaped by his status as an immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany. Serving in the European theater during WWII further molded a man, who, thanks to his orthodox Jewish background and pensive manner, already leaned conservative. Ferguson goes on to recount Kissinger’s time at Harvard, his frustrations writing his phD and attaining a professorship, and how he gradually won his way into foreign policy debates shaping the post-war American posture regarding Korea, nuclear war, and relations with the USSR. His stance of deploying tactical nuclear weapons to shape a limited war with the USSR on the terms of America’s choosing was a novel idea (and welcomed within more hawkish policy circles). Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book are the parallels it reveals between the world of the 196o’s and 2016. In 1964 domestically, Goldwater was an insurgent candidate, who often got into trouble for speaking off the cuff, supported by a disaffected affluent white minority scared of foreign bogeymen and disloyal Americans. Goldwater was despised by the Republican establishment, not least because he seemed so cavalier about nuclear bombs. Kissinger voted for Johnson. Internationally, America was mired in the war in Vietnam against a guerrilla foe who controlled the night and the countryside, while America’s allies hunkered down in enclaves in Saigon. The South Vietnamese leaders fluctuated between inept, corrupt, and secretly allied with the Vietcong (and these were not mutually exclusive). The war, most analysts agreed, could never be one militarily, yet no one was willing to make the necessary compromises with the enemy to make negotiations possible. By the end of 1968 domestically, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, there were race riots in multiple American cities, and a growing rift between the young urban elite and the blue-collar heartland. Internationally, the Tet offensive surprised every intelligence service, America’s alliances were fraying as DeGaulle quit NATO and West German leaders leaned towards amelioration with the East and unification at any price, and the Communist Bloc was destabilized with the Prague Spring and Sino-Soviet split. History might not repeat itself, but it does rhyme in funny ways.