Category: Books

Automation Raises Productivity, Consumer Spending, and Creates New Jobs

(p. B1) Since the 1970s, when automated teller machines arrived, the number of bank tellers in America has more than doubled. James Bessen, an economist who teaches at Boston University School of Law, points to that seeming paradox amid new concerns that automation is “stealing” human jobs. To the contrary, he says, jobs and automation often grow hand in hand.
Sometimes, of course, machines really do replace humans, as in agriculture and manufacturing, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor in a succinct and illuminating TED talk, which could have served as the headline for this column. Across an entire economy, however, Dr. Autor says that’s never happened.
. . .
(p. B4) . . . a long trail of empirical evidence shows that the increased productivity brought about by automation and invention ultimately leads to more wealth, cheaper goods, increased consumer spending power and ultimately, more jobs.
In the case of bank tellers, the spread of ATMs meant bank branches could be smaller, and therefore, cheaper. Banks opened more branches, and in total employed more tellers, Mr. Bessen says.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “KEYWORDS; Automation Actually Can Lead to More Job Creation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 12, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2016, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs.”)

Bessen more fully presents his ATM example in his book:
Bessen, James. Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

British Socialized Medicine Refused to Save Life of Critic Who Loved America

(p. A29) A. A. Gill, an essayist and cultural critic whose stylishly malicious restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists, died on Saturday [December 7, 2016] in London. He was 62.
Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, announced the death, calling Mr. Gill “the heart and soul of the paper.” The cause was lung cancer.
. . .
In a long article published Sunday [December 8, 2016], after his death, Mr. Gill wrote, without rancor, that Britain’s National Health Service had refused to pay for immunotherapy that he said might have extended his life.
. . .
As a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he dismissed the pâté at the beloved Paris bistro L’Ami Louis as tasting like “pressed liposuction.” The shrimp and foie gras dumplings at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian restaurant 66, in Manhattan, were “fishy liver-filled condoms,” he wrote, “with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Vituperation was not his only mode. He could praise. He could turn an elegant phrase and toss off a pithy bon mot. “America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth,” he wrote in “The Golden Door: Letters to America” (2012), published in the United States in 2013 as “To America With Love.”
. . .
“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “A. A. Gill Dies at 62; Skewered Britain’s Restaurants.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 13, 2016): A29.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 12, 2016, and has the title “A. A. Gill, Who Gleefully Skewered Britain’s Restaurants, Dies at 62.”)

Gill’s book praising America, is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Hitler Could Not Face Reality (or His Conscience?) Without Opiates and Cocaine

(p. C1) Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a soft-spoken 46-year-old novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs.
All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April [2017]. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union.
. . .
. . . the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”
. . .
(p. C4) “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”
Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler.”

For the full interview, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “How Hitler’s Henchmen Were Kept Hopped Up.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Kahneman Was “Consumed with Despair” Over Writing “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

(p. C23) Mr. Lewis has always had a knack for identifying eccentrics and horde-defiers who somehow tell us a larger story, generally about an idea that violates our most basic intuition. In “Moneyball,” he gave us Billy Beane, who rejected the wisdom of traditional baseball scouts and rehabilitated the Oakland A’s through statistical reasoning. In “The Big Short,” he gave us an assortment of jittery misfits who bet against the housing market.
In “The Undoing Project,” Mr. Lewis has found the granddaddy of all stories about counterintuition, because Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky did some of the most definitive research about just how majestically, fantastically unreliable our intuition can be. The biases they identified that distort our decision-making are now so well known — like our outsize aversion to loss, for instance — that we take them for granted. Together, you can safely say, these two men made possible the field of behavioral economics, which is predicated on the notion that humans do not always behave rationally.
. . .
In a remarkable note on his sources, Mr. Lewis reveals that for years he watched Dr. Kahneman agonize over his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which became both a critical and a fan favorite. “Every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether — before he destroyed his own reputation,” Mr. Lewis writes. “To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Two Men, Mismatched Yet Perfectly Paired.” The New York Times (Fri., December 2, 2016): C21 & C23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 1, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Michael Lewis on Two Well Matched (but Finally Mismatched) Men.”)

The book under review, is:
Lewis, Michael. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2016.

Empathy Is “a Poor Moral Guide”

(p. C4) “Against Empathy” is an invigorating, relevant and often very funny re-evaluation of empathy, one of our culture’s most ubiquitous sacred cows, which in Mr. Bloom’s view should be gently led to the abattoir. He notes that there are no less than 1,500 books listed on Amazon with “empathy” in the title or subtitle. In politics, practically no higher value exists than being empathetic: Think of the words “I feel your pain” coming from Bill Clinton through a strategically gnawed lip.
. . .
Mr. Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, is having none of it. Empathy, he argues, is “a poor moral guide” in almost all realms of life, whether it’s public policy, private charity or interpersonal relationships. “Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism,” he writes.
. . .
His point, . . . , is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture of caring and detached cost-benefit analysis. His book is a systematic attempt to show why this is so.
To those who say empathy is essential to morality, he’d reply that morality has many sources. “Many wrongs” — like littering or cheating on your taxes — “have no distinct victims to empathize with.” Nor does it appear that the most empathetic people behave the most ethically. “There have been hundreds of studies, with children and adults,” he writes, “and overall the results are: meh.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Have a Heart, but Be Careful Not to Lose Your Head.” The New York Times (Weds., December 7, 2016): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 6, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Against Empathy,’ or the Right Way to Feel Someone’s Pain.”)

The book under review, is:
Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco, 2016.

Complex Regulations Stifle Innovation

(p. A15) In “The Innovation Illusion” . . . [Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel] argue that “there is too little breakthrough innovation . . . and the capitalist system that used to promote eccentricity and embrace ingenuity all too often produces mediocrity.”
The authors identify four factors that have made Western capitalism “dull and hidebound.” The first is “gray capital,” the money held by entities such as investment institutions, which are often just intermediaries for other investors. Their shareholders, say the authors, tend to focus on short-term outcomes, a perspective that makes company managers reluctant to invest in the research and development that is the lifeblood of the new. The authors’ second villain is “corporate managerialism,” which breeds a “custodian corporate culture” that searches for certainty and control instead of “fast and radical innovation.”
A third villain is globalization, though the authors have a novel complaint: The global economy, they say, has given rise to large firms that are more interested in protecting their turf than pursuing path-breaking ideas. Finally, they decry “complex regulation” for injecting uncertainty into corporate investment and thus stifling the emergence of new ideas and new products.
Echoing the views of Northwestern economist Robert Gordon, Messrs. Erixon and Weigel lament the paucity of big-bang innovation, writing that “the advertised technologies for the future underwhelm.” They wonder why there hasn’t been more progress in all sorts of realms, from the engineering of flying cars to the curing of cancer. Responding to those who worry that robots will drive up unemployment, they say that the real concern should be “an innovation famine rather than an innovation feast.”

For the full review, see:

MATTHEW REES. “BOOKSHELF; Bending the Arc of History.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 13, 2016): A15.
(Note: first ellipsis added; second ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 12, 2016,)

The book under review, is:
Erixon, Fredrik, and Björn Weigel. The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2016.

The Good Old Days Were Grim

(p. A15) In “Progress,” the Swedish author Johan Norberg deploys reams of data to show just how much life has improved–especially over the past few decades but over the past couple of centuries as well. Each chapter is devoted to documenting progress in a single category, including food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy and equality.
In response to people who look fondly on the “good old days,” Mr. Norberg underscores just how grim they could be. Rampant disease, famine and violence routinely killed off millions. In the 14th century, the so-called Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Five hundred years later, cholera outbreaks throughout the world led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and even killed a U.S. president, James Polk.

For the full review, see:

MATTHEW REES. “BOOKSHELF; Bending the Arc of History.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 13, 2016): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 12, 2016,)

The book under review, is:
Norberg, Johan. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2016.

The Octopus, Though Intelligent, Only Lives for Two Years

(p. C5) Around 600 million years ago there lived in the sea a small unprepossessing worm, virtually eyeless and brainless. For some reason this species split into two, thus seeding the vast zoological groupings of the vertebrates and the invertebrates. On one branch sit the mammals; on the other sit the molluscs (and many others). Among these two groups, two notable creatures eye each other warily: the human and the octopus. They have no common ancestor apart from that lowly worm, yet there is a strange affinity, a bond almost. For they are both evolutionary experiments in intelligence–pockets of genius in a vast ocean (sorry!) of biological mediocrity.
In “Other Minds,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at CUNY and an avid scuba diver, has given us a smoothly written and captivating account of the octopus and its brethren, as observed by humans. He celebrates the cephalopods: the octopus, the squid and the cuttlefish. He stresses their dissimilarity to us and other mammals, but he also wants us to appreciate what we have in common. Just as eyes have evolved independently in many lineages, so have intelligent minds. From those mindless worms, via two separate evolutionary paths, to the glories of consciousness and curiosity–we are brothers in big brains.
. . .
(p. C6) Mr. Godfrey-Smith mixes the scientific with the personal, giving us lively descriptions of his dives to “Octopolis,” a site off the east coast of Australia at which octopuses gather. There they make their dens in piles of scallop shells. He also reproduces some excellent photographs of the octopuses and other cephalopods he has observed in his submerged city. It is with a jolt, then, that he announces the average life span of the cephalopod: one to two years. That’s it: That marvelous complex body, the large brain, lively mind and amazing Technicolor skin–all over so quickly. There are boring little fish that live for 200 years, and the closely related nautilus can live for 20 years, but the octopus has only a year or two to enjoy its uniqueness. Mr. Godfrey-Smith speculates that the brevity results from a lifestyle that forces the animal to reach reproductive age as soon as possible, given the problem of predators such as whales or large fish.
Whatever the biological reason for such a brief life, it is a melancholy fact.
. . .
What is it like to be an octopus? It’s not easy to say, but I speculate soft, malleable, brimming with sensation, vivid, expressive, exciting, complicated, tragic and determined. They make good, if brief, use of their portion of consciousness. They must live by the evolutionary laws that have created them, but there is an inner being that makes the best of its lot. Though it’s easy to think of octopuses as alien, a better view is that they are our cousins in biological destiny–spirits in a material world.

For the full review, see:
COLIN MCGINN. “Experiments in Intelligence.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 3, 2016): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 4 [sic], 2016, and has the title “Our Noble Cousin: The Octopus.”)

The book under review, is:
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

One Way to Defend Free Trade (in Honor of Reagan’s Birthday)

(p. A9) Baldrige also knew how to use humor to deflate tense moments, as when the U.S. toy balloon industry petitioned for protection against cheap Mexican imports. Baldrige was opposed, but after debate the entire cabinet favored sanctions. Sensing this was not where the president wanted to go, Baldrige pulled from his pocket a dozen toy balloons and tossed them on the cabinet table. As the room filled with laughter, he said, “This is what we are talking about.” Reagan denied the sanctions.

For the full review, see:
CLARK S. JUDGE. “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 5, 2016): A9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 4, 2016, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.”)

The book under review, is:
Black, Chris, and B. Jay Cooper. Mac Baldrige: The Cowboy in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2015.

Innovation Brought Rise of Middle Class and Decline of Aristocracy

(p. C7) Mr. Evans claims that “master narratives” have fallen into disrepute, and he does not aspire to provide one. But he returns repeatedly to such themes as the growth of “public space” as Europe urbanized and communications improved. He likewise describes the “shifting contours of inequality” as the middle classes burgeoned and benefited from the hastening pace of scientific innovation while the aristocracy slowly declined in status (albeit not in creature comforts).
Similarly, Mr. Evans offers an interesting discussion of how various forms of serfdom disappeared, even as the essence of rural immiseration generally did not. He conveys the degradation of existence for the emergent working class of the cities with controlled pathos yet without acknowledging the improvements in living standards that took place in advanced countries during the last decades of the century. He adduces evidence to show that the benefits of improved sanitation and hygiene, health and nutrition, consumer products and home conveniences, as well as longer life expectancy, went at first disproportionately to the urban middle and professional classes, strata that tripled as a fraction of the population in leading countries. Thus even in comparatively prosperous England, well-off adolescents at midcentury stood almost 9 inches taller than their proletarian contemporaries and by 1900 enjoyed a life expectancy 14 years longer.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN A. SCHUKER. “The European Century.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 3, 2016): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 2, 2016, and has the title “A Long Century of Peace.”)

The book under review, is:
Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. New York: Viking, 2016.

Not All Old Ideas Should Be Recycled

(p. C16) “What is true in the consumer tech industry is true in science and other fields of thinking,” Mr. Poole elaborates. “The story of human understanding is not a gradual, stately accumulation of facts” but rather “a wild roller-coaster ride full of loops and switchbacks.”
Horses, for example, are once again being used in warfare in the Middle East. Vinyl records are back after losing out to digital CDs and internet streaming. Leeches, whose use was once considered a barbaric medieval practice, are now an FDA-approved “medical device” for cleaning wounds. Bicycles are making a comeback as a popular and efficient means of moving about in large, crowded cities. Blimps are starting to compete with helicopters for moving heavy cargo.
. . .
To understand this process of rediscovery–“old is the new new”–we need to abandon the myth of progress as something that results from a rejection of all that is old.
Still, not all old ideas will return reconfigured into new and useful ones, and it is here where readers may find room for disagreement, despite Mr. Poole’s many caveats.
. . .
That there are many unsolved mysteries in science does not always mean that we should turn to the past for insight. Sometimes–usually, in fact–the bad ideas rejected by science belong in the graveyard. Phlogiston, miasma, spontaneous generation, the luminiferous aether–wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.
Nevertheless, those notions–and many others that Mr. Poole surveys in this thought-provoking book–were wrong in ways that led scientists toward a better understanding, and the middle chapters of “Rethink” elegantly recount these stories. Going forward, Mr. Poole ends by suggesting that we adopt a “view from tomorrow” in which we “try to consider an idea free of the moral weight that attaches to it in particular historical circumstances” and that “we could try to get into the habit of deferring judgments about ideas more generally” in order to keep an open mind. On the flip side, skeptics should not rush to dismiss a consensus idea as wrong just because consensus science is not always right. Most of today’s ideas gained consensus in the first place for a very good reason: evidence. Do you know what we call alternative science with evidence? Science.

For the full review, see:

MICHAEL SHERMER. “Everything Old Is New Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “Electric Cars Are Old News.”)

The book under review, is:
Poole, Steven. Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. New York: Scribner, 2016.