Martin van Creveld: The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz, Free Press 1991.

This was was pushed on me by Eirik Newth, on the theory that I would be interested. He was right. Van Creveld shows how the traditional, Clausewitzian concept of war (as a fairly regulated game between two clearly identifiable nations, a “continuation of politics by other means”) breaks down when the fight is not about land, but survival, and when the power differential between the two warring parties is too great, the nature of war will change towards terrorism and other forms of “low-intensity” conflicts, increasingly also targeting political or military leaders rather than their fortifications.

His definition of war is interesting: It is not a “real” war unless both parties are putting their lives at risk. Soldiers attacking a weak or unarmed enemy are committing an atrocity, which harms them morally and in the long term renders their cause unjust. Here is an excerpt of this in my opinion pivotal point (p. 175):

Another very important reason why, over time, the strong and the weak will come to resemble each other, even to the point of changing places, is rooted in the different ethical circumstances under which they operate. Necessity knows no bounds; hence he who is weak can afford to go to the greatest lengths, resort to the most underhand means, and commit every kind of atrocity without compromizing his political support and, more important still, his moral principles. Conversely, almost anything the strong does or does not do is, in one sense, unnecessary and, therefore, cruel. For him, the only road to salvation is to win quickly in order to escape the worst consequences of his own cruelty; swift, ruthless brutality may well prove more merciful than prolonged restraint. A terrible end is better than endless terror and is certainly more effective. By way of an analogy, suppose a cat and mouse situation. Its very size precludes the mouse from tormenting the cat, though it is capable of driving him crazy–a different matter altogether. The cat, however, must kill the mouse at once. should it fail to do so, then its very size and strength will cause its actions to be perceived as unnecessary; hence–had it been human–as cruel.

There are a number of other points as well – about the role of women in war, for instance: The smaller the group, the more directly active the women, but as soon as things become organized and regular, the women are relegated to support roles, so as not to spoil the game for the men.

This book was written in 1991 and does, of course, not say much about the Iraq conflict, but it is, according to Wikipedia, required reading for US Army officers. It should be.

On the negative side, the writing is uneven and a bit repetitive – I found myself longing for a table or some sort of timeline of wars, and fewer restatements of the main hypothesis. But in most places, it shines.

Kevin Kelly’s very useful blog Cool Tools has an entry about the Sony Portable Reader, which the reviewer thinks trumps the Iliad. I have been meaning to get one of these devices for a while – looks like it will be Sony, on the theory that it is better to get one device that does things well than one that does many things less well. Anyone with Iliad experience?

Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995): A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.

This is the book to pick up if you feel guilty about having too many books: Basbanes tells of book collectors and their passion, describing the need to have many books and to keep them (and, occasionally, read them) as a psychological condition its sufferers have no need or desire to be cured of.

Basbanes writes beautifully, with passion and compassion, anecdote after story after chronicle of collectors from Winston Churchill to a man who stole more than 30,000 rare books from libraries around the USA. He dives into the rare book markets and their mechanisms and describes what collectors do to make sure that their collection lives after them (donates them to universities, mostly, with stipulations on where and how the books are to be kept.)

If you ever have felt guilty (as I have) about those cases of books in the basement and the lack of visible wall surfaces in your home, this is the cure: Basbanes make it all seem so normal, almost desirable. 

How fitting that it is out of print – if you can get your hands on a copy, add it to you collection!

Amartya Sen: The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (2006), Picador.

I picked this up in India, after having read Gurcharan Das’ India Unbound and wanting to learn more about the history and society of a country that holds a fifth of the world’s population and now, finally, is beginning to pull its weight in the international economy. Sen’s collection of essays is the intellectual complement to Das’ rather easier and less multifaceted account of the economic liberation of India, focusing on the central aspects of deliberation ("argumentativeness") and religious tolerance that has been central to India for centuries.

The book echoes my own impression of India: That it is a mosaic rather than a melting  pot, and a mosaic that seems to be able to sort things out in a peaceful, democratic and intellectual manner. Notwithstanding certain dynastic tendencies (not unlike the USA, incidentally), India has always been a heterogenous society, tolerant of religious variety, open to ideas, with lively debates and a relative lack of coercion.

Any collection of essays, primarily built on speeches, runs the risk of repetitiveness and a certain heaviness of language, and this collection is no exception. I particularly like the chapter on Tagore and his role in the building of India (for some reason he is seen as a sometime-fashionable mystic by Western readers, at least as I dimly remember from my high-school days), as well as the discussions of India’s argumentative tradition throughout the centuries – democracy did not come to India with the English, who rather built on a tradition of debate and openness that was already there. Sen cautions against an idea of India as a monocultural country in general, and as a militant Hindu contry in particular: India has 180 million Muslims, for instance, living peacefully among many other religions.

I have not heard this poem by Tagore, quoted by Sen in the book, but it sums up Sen’s hopes for his country – and describes the foundation of heterogeneity and openness he sees as there to build on:

Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink. London, Penguin.

Sometimes you make the right decision in two seconds, because intuition tells you so. This book is about those two seconds.

Snap judgments work because we use our unconscious to look for small cues that we don’t know that we know. If we try to rationalize the process and explain why we reaced a decision, it will bear little relationship to reality: They are different decision-making processes.

Many interesting examples: Art experts instantly spotting fakes, analytically oriented strategies losing to quick improvisation in war games, police making fatal mistakes (such as the Amadou shooting), experts being able to tell when someone is lying by looking for millisecond facial expressions. The skill of snap judgements can be trained (and many police forces do.)

This is a light read, but well researched. I picked it up before a long plane ride, and did not regret it. (Looked at it in 2005, but I had overdosed on these kinds of books after reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which isn’t nearly as good.)

Recommended.

The New Yorker has a good article about Wikipedia, written by Stacy Schiff. Nothing really new here, but it is well written, has a fairly complete history of Wikipedia, and made me read about the Boston Molasses Disaster….

Boris Akunin: Murder on the Leviathan, Phoenix, 2004

Writers of historical detective novels have a dilemma: Should their protagonist be modern (in the sense that he or she is rational, humanist, evidence-based, and not hampered by the superstitions of the day) or saddled with contemporary racial, scientific and historical prejudices? Umberto Eco’s Thomas of Ockam (in The Name of the Rose), for instance, has been criticised as almost superhumanely modern for the 14th century.

B. Akunin’s hero Erast Fandorin strikes a nice balance, and I look forward to reading more of the books about him. The Leviathan is a classical (a tad bit too classical, actually) tale in the tradition of Agatha Christie, with a limited set of suspects, each with their own secrets that eventually come out, a conspiracy, and a bumbling police detective. The plot is fantastic, but I get a little bit annoyed with the breaking of one of the key rules of the classical crime novel: Thou shalt not introduce evidence the reader does not have access to as part of the explanation. Furthermore, I found the Parisian police inspector a tad bit too bumbling to be believable, and the alternative theories offered a bit too contrived.

But these are minor annoyances: B. Akunin cheats a little, but does even begin to sink to the Dan Brownish levels. I at first found the Japanese participant a little hard to believe, but since the author is a expert on historical Japan I will take him at his word. And the Victorian pace and language of the novel is not irritating, simply because it is done consistently and with great care. What the novel lack in tightness of the plot and terseness of description it makes up for in richness of characters and liveliness of villains. More Sherlock Holmes than Miss Maple.

In Norway, the Easter vacation is often spent reading mysteries – a tradition borne from skiing holidays spent in log cabins with bad weather and lack of electricity. I could think of worse company than B. Akunin’s books, especially as a replacement of the musty Agatha Christie volumes commonly found there.

Edward E. Leamer, Chauncey J. Medberry Professor of Management at Anderson School, UCLA, has written an excellent critique of Tom Friedman’s The world is flat. In fact, something close to the review I wish I had written rather than what I wrote.

Leamer has some issues with the imprecise language and confusion of direct and indirect causality of Friedman, but ends up concluding that the book communicates a message rather well – and that the market, despite his misgivings about the book, has concluded that it is good. Language and metaphor trumps academic discipline and data. Leamer reduces Friedman’s ten forces to three (p.12):

1. More Unskilled Workers: Economic liberalizations has injected a huge number of unskilled workers into the global labor market.
2. New Equipment for Knowledge Workers: The Internet and the PC have fundamentally changed the nature of knowledge work, raising productivity and emphasizing talent.
3. Communications Innovations: Cell-phones, beepers [beepers? who uses beepers?], e- mail and voice-mail keep us all wired and connected 24/7, thus eliminating the borderline between time at work and time at leisure. These same communication tools, together with the Internet and virtually costless telecommunications have extended the geographic reach of suppliers, and have increased the intensity of competition for mundane work.

and argues that the first two aren’t "flattening", only the third (and he much prefers the term "smaller world"). In essence, we can communicate, so distance becomes less important. Another turn on Beniger’s control screw, in essence.

Leamer also discusses the impact of the communications revolution on work, saying that the more "mundane" the work, to a larger extent it can be moved to a place with lower labor costs. He even provides this list of work in terms of its mundanity:

1. Type this page.
2. Edit this page.
3. Write an article for an Economics journal.
4. Write a good joke.

(Incidentally, I love this list, because I can, at least when I feel a need for self-justification, place blogging somewhere between 3 and 4 and thereby tell myself that I am doing something unique. Or perhaps something nobody else wants to do?) He also draws a useful distinction between trade that requires a relationship and trade that doesn’t but stops short of discussing to what extent increased communication can establish relationships that will enable trade to move from the very mundane to the less mundane.

Where Leamer really shines is in the facts department, where he shows that the world is becoming flatter at a much smaller rate and in a much more localized pattern than Friedman postulates. Income in India and China is on the rise, but the top 18% of the world rises faster. (He also points to Yale professor William Nordhaus’ excellent spinning globe, which indicates a kind of temperature chart of economic activity, showing red-hot localized areas (notably few in India and China) and solid blue for most of the globe.) Trade contributes to the decline in manufacturing jobs, but doesn’t seem to be the primary driver (technology is). Outsourcing of intellectual work is "a small drop in a very large bucket", and the US does not need to fear for its economic leadership in Tom Friedman’s world.

Leamer concludes with a useful distinction between the computer as forklift (a source of income equality, since anyone can learn how to operate a forklift and thus obviate competitive advantages in strenght) and the computer as microphone (an amplifier of talent and thus a source of income inequality). He ends by saying that the world is not getting flatter, but that to a larger extent the difference will be between those with and without talent.

Which sounds a lot like a flatter world to me.

And therein lies my issue with Leamer’s paper, to the extent I have one. To me, his conclusion sounds like Friedman’s, albeit with less fancy metaphors (though still halting – a weak artist gets better with a microphone, and song distribution services like Pandora are income equalisers for talent, in that they decompose the delivery of music and thus reduces the need for recognizeable artists).

For my part, I think economists should do what I think Leamer is doing, but not quite admitting: Come to peace with Tom Friedman and his book, and use it (and, of course, Tom Friedman) as a communications vehicle to promote what Hans Rosling calls a facts-based discussion of globalization and economics. Tom Friedman creates language and ideas that may not be as precise and well-defined as academia would want, and his conclusions are definitely on the livelier side of average. But people read the book and, like it or not, it becomes the reference point. And I read Leamer’s critique because, well, I read Tom Friedman’s book.

Worse could have happened. Think of philosophers having to explain their ideas in terms of Sophie’s World, The Tao of Pooh, and anything Ayn Rand has put out. Not to mention management researchers having to deal with Who moved my cheese? At least Friedman tells good stories and provides wonderful examples. It is up to academe to bring a more coherent story to the table, and make it as understandable.

(Via Marginal Revolution via Brad Delong.)

Jim McGee has a good list of books on knowledge work at his blog. I recognize a number of favorites (Information architecture; anything by Christopher Alexander, though the choice here is one of the denser ones; and Don Norman’s Design of everyday things.)  Others are not my favorites – Gause and Weinberger’s "Are your lights on?" is one of the few books I have actually thrown out. Langer’s Mindfulness I read in grad school and it irritated me with what I felt were rather simplistic exhortions to pay attention.

Much as I like many of these books (at least for the ones that focus on the thinking part of knoweldge work), I wonder whether we have a causality problem – is it that people who work smart and pay attention seek out books like these, or do reading them actually help in some way. I suspect that there is some sort of middle ground – people who are aware of the need to think creatively create crutches for themselves, partially by exposing themselves to many patterns, and then get a jump start in the writing, searching (an area missing from Jim’s list, incidentally) or creative process by starting from a known example or platform.

In one of his books, Richard Feynmann explain a colleague’s incredible performance in standup mathematics by saying that he had worked so much with numbers that when faced with any calculation he could approximate fast – "It was easy for him – everything was close to something he knew." Some of these books – and I suppose which book will work for whom is highly individual – will offer a few more known places to start from.

(And while you are at it, check out Jim’s post on essays on research work as well. Great stuff.) 

Tom Evslin still maintains that he will sign all pre-ordered copies of hackoff.com – so now I have ordered it. Still fun to read in installments, though. I especially like the use of links, graphics and other web paraphernalia in the book – and it is beginning to shape up as a real crime novel (now at chapter 14.4.)

Steve Pinker‘s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a wonderful book, not only for its wide reach and deep discussion, but also for the lively and opinionated language. Like The Economist, Pinker writes objectively with a view – though he clearly has an a opinion, well thought out and researched, in the nature-vs-nurture debate, he is careful to examine evidence and give the other side its due. Not that there is much.

Articulated, polemic and with more than a whiff of exasperated sarcasm, Steven Pinker attacks three misconceptions in modern culture: The Blank Slate, the idea that nurture, not nature, is the main shaping force behind human behavior; The Noble Savage, that the badness of the modern condition comes from the modern conditions – and things were somehow better before we got modern technology and transportation; and the Ghost in the Machine, that human thought is somehow an unexplainable superset of the machinery of the brain. Pinker starts out by describing these ideas, showing how they are founded not on scientific evidence but rather because of wishful thinking and deeply held beliefs about how the world should be.  Scientific studies find that our genetic makeup to an uncomfortable degree shapes who we are and what we will do.  The good old days, especially in the jungle and on the savannah, turn out to be just another myth.  And increasingly sophisticated models of the many complex mechanisms in our brains makes it easier to understand, if not accept, the idea that our soul essentially is “the program that runs on our brain’s computer”, to quote Daniel Dennett (in Consciousness Explained).

Pinker then goes on to what for me was the first new part of the argument – showing that there is no inherent moral position in either nurture or nature – in fact, showing that taken to extremes, they are both as bad.  He positions Nazism as the ultimate genetic extremism – the belief that a certain race or other group of people has inherent superiority over others.  Then he argues that the communism of Pol Pot – who killed a third of Cambodia’s population – is the ultimate environmental extremism, arguing that anyone who exposed to the corrupting influences of modern ideas, such as education or even urbanism, should be killed (“Only the children are innocent”).  (I suppose Mao’s cultural revolution was based on some of the same thinking.) He mocks the idea that either stance frees us from responsibility for our actions.  The beliefs, for instance, that criminals, as a group, are incorrigible or redeemable depending on whether you see them as monsters born to rob or innocent victims of unfortunate circumstances are both wrong.

Pinker attributes the anxiety about human nature – especially the idea that we may be more shaped by genes that we like to think – to four fears (p. 138):

1. The Fear of Inequality: if people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified
2. The Fear of Imperfectibility: if people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile
3. The Fear of Determinism: if people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions
4. The Fear of Nihilism: if people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose

In the subsequent four chapters, he deals with each of these fears, laying out a foundation for a humane moralism that does not rely on myths as its foundation, making humans responsible for their fate no matter their genetic setup. The downside of the misconceptions of the blank slate and the other ideas lies in their consequences: “persecution of the successful, intrusive social engineering, the writing off of suffering in other cultures, an incomprehension of the logic of justice, and the devaluing of human life on earth.” (p.193)

The fourth part of the book takes as its starting point that much of our world-view is based on intuitions that served us well in a small society – nomadic hunter-gatherers – but which may no longer be true in a modern society, such as our fear of advanced science, of genetically modified food (all our food is genetically modified – by selective breeding through hundreds of years). We are prone to misinterpreting images, to misunderstanding evolution, and to overindulging in sanctimony, reasoning by moralism rather than sense.

The fifth and last part of the book deals with certain “hot buttons” that Pinker criticizes science for refusing to discuss, such as politics (why left and right fall into patterns), violence (humans are violent), gender (there are physical differences, notably that while the mean is the same, men have a larger variance than women, i.e., more idiots and more geniuses), children (shaped by genes and peers rather than parents, though the parents play a part in selecting the environment), and the arts (threatened less by lack of funding and quality than by “…a surfeit of of Ph.D.s pumped out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control.” (p401)). I especially liked his digs at postmodernism, which makes challenging of its authority impossible.

Wonderful stuff, deeply researched, fantastic language, strong arguments – what’s not to like? Nothing. Read it.

Update 18 jan 2006: Here is a video of Pinker presenting and discussing his book at MIT.

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