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Michael W. Hudson, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis: In many ways this was the most painful book of the many I’ve read about the financial crisis, because it focused lower down on the chain: the subprime mortgages packaged in securitizations, telling the stories of the people who sold them (twenty-four-year-olds making $150,000 a year and blowing it on drugs and cars, using the money as an excuse not to look any further into what they were doing, or experienced salesmen who let the money seduce them too, unless they got so sick of themselves that they had to quick) and the people who signed up (often under incredible sales pressure, and even that wasn’t enough—there was plenty of outright fraud in what they were told and in forgery of their signatures on false documents), as well as the people who made the long-term, big money and walked away with almost all of it (in one case, also with an ambassadorship) and the regulators who tried to fight this system but lost again and again because the lenders were more politically powerful and willing to donate huge sums to keep it that way (and we all know that government regulation is a bad idea).
It’s an enraging story and it’s not fixed, though I’m experiencing at least some schadenfreude with the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling pointing out that the entities foreclosing on a lot of these loans have no proof that they own them, because these experienced and sophisticated businesses who insist that unsophisticated homeowners are responsible for every piece of paper those homeowners (allegedly) signed—wait for it—didn’t keep actual records, or transfer them as the securitizers promised to do in the contracts they signed with the banks and investors. Ooops. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer industry.
Rachel Manija Brown: All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India: I was a bit worried about reading this, because I really enjoy the author’s journal, and what if I didn’t like the book, which is a bit outside of my usual fare? Fortunately, it’s great! Brown describes a child’s-eye view of a terrifying upbringing in rural India, where she moved with her guru-following parents. As she emphasizes, she was a misfit in India and in America, where her bookishness didn’t help. She writes with a wry humor and, in retrospect, an attempt to understand what was going on with her parents, but mostly this is a story told from the perspective of a child who is never entirely sure if what’s happening is weird or just the way things are, which is kind of how I remember my own distinctly nonterrifying bookish childhood.
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”: Williams argues that filmed pornography went through a trajectory in the twentieth century of increasing attention to the problem of women’s pleasure (or of how to represent women’s pleasure), which meant that pornographic films went from narrativeless “stag” films to narratives that, if not great storylines, actually attempted coherence. Stags didn’t feature “money shots” (male ejaculation) as late 20th-century porn did; she argues that the male money shot is often a stand-in for female orgasm, which lacks the same type of visual evidence. As she points out, the term “money shot” unites commodification and sexuality as well as visuality. Twenty years on, I can’t help but want another chapter about internet pornography, gonzo porn (in contrast to the feature films she argues were at least responding to, if not incorporating, feminist critiques in that they no longer depicted rape as pleasurable for the victim), and the apparent return of the non-narrative stag-type film that’s just a bunch of sex acts.
Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why: I found this book a lot less engaging than I wanted to. Gonzales argues that being a survivor is fundamentally about being both prepared and open: prepared, in having certain skills that allow you to survive in the environment in which you find yourself (like knowing how to make a fire in the wilderness) and open—picking up on signs from your surroundings and responding to them; making rational plans but being flexible when necessary.
Though many of the stories were striking and intense, I felt like there was a lot of padding in the book—huge amounts of repetition, especially of catchphrases about the brain (panic bad; distanced rationality good). And Gonzales basically assumed rather than defined “survivor,” even though he also noted that some people who do everything right die anyway because the challenges are too great and some people who don’t do things right don’t die because they are lucky, so “survivor” turns out to mean something in between “someone who has the fortitude to survive crisis” and “someone who possesses attributes of which I approve.” Most of the survival stories are wilderness or shipwreck based, though there are a couple of 2001 World Trade Center stories. And there’s a fair amount about Gonzales’ attempt to emulate his war hero/bombing raid crash and war camp survivor father by taking extreme risks and flying stunt planes, which did not seem to me to be very comparable. At the end Gonzales steps back to argue that it’s not just natural for humans to do things like climb dangerous mountains that regularly kill people, but also admirable, because (at least if they do it with training and knowledge of the risks they’re taking) they live more fulfilling lives. Um, maybe, for them? But I concluded that smug outdoorsmen are really no more fun to listen to than smug marrieds.
Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made: Toye surveys Churchill’s acts and statements about Britain’s empire, from Ireland to South Africa, Canada, Australia, and India, over the course of his extremely eventful lifetime. The book therefore skims over a lot of things that deserve (and have) books of their own, but I was really interested in how Toye showed Churchill’s concepts of empire operating in so many different contexts. Toye points out that those who excuse Churchill’s racism as typical for a Victorian of his upbringing have to deal with the fact that other Britons with similar backgrounds managed to do better. Ultimately, Churchill was an overt racist: though he espoused the idea that “civilized” men were all entitled to the same rights, he defined civilization in such a way that it was very hard for nonwhites to achieve it. At the same time, his concepts of empire and of the shared destiny of the “English-speaking peoples” complicated his reactions to developments in Britain’s colonies/protectorates/etc., as did his keen desire for political power.
Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us: An interesting take on the behavioral psychology literature, this book focuses on perception and memory. We think we’re a lot better at perceiving things than we are, which is why we’re shocked to find out that a gorilla walked out into the middle of a basketball game while we were busy counting passes. We think that we’re a lot better at paying attention than we are, which is why driving while talking on a cellphone, handsfree or not, is so dangerous. We think we’re a lot better at remembering things than we are, which is why we are so often wrong about even the most salient memories, such as violent crimes or traumatic events, why juries convict based on sincere but misguided eyewitness testimony, and why we assume people are lying when they may just be remembering what they really think happened. We make judgments about cause from simple temporal association, which can be tragically wrong, as with the purported vaccine-autism connection. And so on. Some of this stuff is familiar from the spate of behavioral psych books in recent years, but I definitely learned things (verbal overshadowing: describing an unfamiliar face in words decreases your ability to remember that face later), and the authors had a fun time savaging Malcolm Gladwell and various readings/over-readings of Blink.
Charles Seife, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception: This is a book about the misuse of math, particularly statistics, in public life, covering politics, elections (voting and apportionment), criminal trials (including the death penalty), and various other topics. I found it quite readable—the whole point is that you don’t need to know much math to identify when someone is fooling you, or themselves, with numbers, because there are predictable habits of distortion. The appendix explanation of the “prosecutor’s fallacy,” which I know more formally as an aspect of Bayesian logic (see conditional probability), is very well done. (I once was involved in a case where we easily spent six figures educating the judge about why the prediction that two names would be confused with a 99% likelihood was bunk, since it ignored the extremely low base rate of confusion.)
Annoying: Seife coins some overly cutesy terms such as “randumbness,” though this habit also produced the truly brilliant concept of “regression to the moon,” where someone cluelessly or maliciously uses an “if this goes on …” extrapolation to show that, for example, if top women runners keep their present rate of improvement, they will beat men within a few years (and then proceed to break the sound barrier). (The accepted term on which this is a play, regression to the mean, or technically regression towards the mean, is the tendency of extremes to moderate, meaning that, all else being equal, the children of highly intelligent parents are likely to be less intelligent, something my parents were quick to remind me of when I was growing up—which says a lot about me and my parents.)
I initially thought that his statement that “[t]he Ken Lays and the Bernie Madoffs of the world are able to make their money by hiding risk and moving it from place to place, deceiving their investors,” was just wrong, because Ponzi schemes are not about risk; there is a certainty that they cannot work. Nor did investors generally think that later investors would get screwed but they themselves would pull out in time. On the other hand, the risk-hiding and risk-increasing contortions that the larger financial system went into are on a continuum with Ponzi schemes. And it’s certainly possible that some of the people involved in the Ponzi schemes convinced themselves that things would magically work out, because the alternative was too painful to contemplate, so in that sense they were willfully denying reality, but it still seems odd to me to describe this as concealment of risk.
It’s an enraging story and it’s not fixed, though I’m experiencing at least some schadenfreude with the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling pointing out that the entities foreclosing on a lot of these loans have no proof that they own them, because these experienced and sophisticated businesses who insist that unsophisticated homeowners are responsible for every piece of paper those homeowners (allegedly) signed—wait for it—didn’t keep actual records, or transfer them as the securitizers promised to do in the contracts they signed with the banks and investors. Ooops. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer industry.
Rachel Manija Brown: All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India: I was a bit worried about reading this, because I really enjoy the author’s journal, and what if I didn’t like the book, which is a bit outside of my usual fare? Fortunately, it’s great! Brown describes a child’s-eye view of a terrifying upbringing in rural India, where she moved with her guru-following parents. As she emphasizes, she was a misfit in India and in America, where her bookishness didn’t help. She writes with a wry humor and, in retrospect, an attempt to understand what was going on with her parents, but mostly this is a story told from the perspective of a child who is never entirely sure if what’s happening is weird or just the way things are, which is kind of how I remember my own distinctly nonterrifying bookish childhood.
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”: Williams argues that filmed pornography went through a trajectory in the twentieth century of increasing attention to the problem of women’s pleasure (or of how to represent women’s pleasure), which meant that pornographic films went from narrativeless “stag” films to narratives that, if not great storylines, actually attempted coherence. Stags didn’t feature “money shots” (male ejaculation) as late 20th-century porn did; she argues that the male money shot is often a stand-in for female orgasm, which lacks the same type of visual evidence. As she points out, the term “money shot” unites commodification and sexuality as well as visuality. Twenty years on, I can’t help but want another chapter about internet pornography, gonzo porn (in contrast to the feature films she argues were at least responding to, if not incorporating, feminist critiques in that they no longer depicted rape as pleasurable for the victim), and the apparent return of the non-narrative stag-type film that’s just a bunch of sex acts.
Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why: I found this book a lot less engaging than I wanted to. Gonzales argues that being a survivor is fundamentally about being both prepared and open: prepared, in having certain skills that allow you to survive in the environment in which you find yourself (like knowing how to make a fire in the wilderness) and open—picking up on signs from your surroundings and responding to them; making rational plans but being flexible when necessary.
Though many of the stories were striking and intense, I felt like there was a lot of padding in the book—huge amounts of repetition, especially of catchphrases about the brain (panic bad; distanced rationality good). And Gonzales basically assumed rather than defined “survivor,” even though he also noted that some people who do everything right die anyway because the challenges are too great and some people who don’t do things right don’t die because they are lucky, so “survivor” turns out to mean something in between “someone who has the fortitude to survive crisis” and “someone who possesses attributes of which I approve.” Most of the survival stories are wilderness or shipwreck based, though there are a couple of 2001 World Trade Center stories. And there’s a fair amount about Gonzales’ attempt to emulate his war hero/bombing raid crash and war camp survivor father by taking extreme risks and flying stunt planes, which did not seem to me to be very comparable. At the end Gonzales steps back to argue that it’s not just natural for humans to do things like climb dangerous mountains that regularly kill people, but also admirable, because (at least if they do it with training and knowledge of the risks they’re taking) they live more fulfilling lives. Um, maybe, for them? But I concluded that smug outdoorsmen are really no more fun to listen to than smug marrieds.
Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made: Toye surveys Churchill’s acts and statements about Britain’s empire, from Ireland to South Africa, Canada, Australia, and India, over the course of his extremely eventful lifetime. The book therefore skims over a lot of things that deserve (and have) books of their own, but I was really interested in how Toye showed Churchill’s concepts of empire operating in so many different contexts. Toye points out that those who excuse Churchill’s racism as typical for a Victorian of his upbringing have to deal with the fact that other Britons with similar backgrounds managed to do better. Ultimately, Churchill was an overt racist: though he espoused the idea that “civilized” men were all entitled to the same rights, he defined civilization in such a way that it was very hard for nonwhites to achieve it. At the same time, his concepts of empire and of the shared destiny of the “English-speaking peoples” complicated his reactions to developments in Britain’s colonies/protectorates/etc., as did his keen desire for political power.
Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us: An interesting take on the behavioral psychology literature, this book focuses on perception and memory. We think we’re a lot better at perceiving things than we are, which is why we’re shocked to find out that a gorilla walked out into the middle of a basketball game while we were busy counting passes. We think that we’re a lot better at paying attention than we are, which is why driving while talking on a cellphone, handsfree or not, is so dangerous. We think we’re a lot better at remembering things than we are, which is why we are so often wrong about even the most salient memories, such as violent crimes or traumatic events, why juries convict based on sincere but misguided eyewitness testimony, and why we assume people are lying when they may just be remembering what they really think happened. We make judgments about cause from simple temporal association, which can be tragically wrong, as with the purported vaccine-autism connection. And so on. Some of this stuff is familiar from the spate of behavioral psych books in recent years, but I definitely learned things (verbal overshadowing: describing an unfamiliar face in words decreases your ability to remember that face later), and the authors had a fun time savaging Malcolm Gladwell and various readings/over-readings of Blink.
Charles Seife, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception: This is a book about the misuse of math, particularly statistics, in public life, covering politics, elections (voting and apportionment), criminal trials (including the death penalty), and various other topics. I found it quite readable—the whole point is that you don’t need to know much math to identify when someone is fooling you, or themselves, with numbers, because there are predictable habits of distortion. The appendix explanation of the “prosecutor’s fallacy,” which I know more formally as an aspect of Bayesian logic (see conditional probability), is very well done. (I once was involved in a case where we easily spent six figures educating the judge about why the prediction that two names would be confused with a 99% likelihood was bunk, since it ignored the extremely low base rate of confusion.)
Annoying: Seife coins some overly cutesy terms such as “randumbness,” though this habit also produced the truly brilliant concept of “regression to the moon,” where someone cluelessly or maliciously uses an “if this goes on …” extrapolation to show that, for example, if top women runners keep their present rate of improvement, they will beat men within a few years (and then proceed to break the sound barrier). (The accepted term on which this is a play, regression to the mean, or technically regression towards the mean, is the tendency of extremes to moderate, meaning that, all else being equal, the children of highly intelligent parents are likely to be less intelligent, something my parents were quick to remind me of when I was growing up—which says a lot about me and my parents.)
I initially thought that his statement that “[t]he Ken Lays and the Bernie Madoffs of the world are able to make their money by hiding risk and moving it from place to place, deceiving their investors,” was just wrong, because Ponzi schemes are not about risk; there is a certainty that they cannot work. Nor did investors generally think that later investors would get screwed but they themselves would pull out in time. On the other hand, the risk-hiding and risk-increasing contortions that the larger financial system went into are on a continuum with Ponzi schemes. And it’s certainly possible that some of the people involved in the Ponzi schemes convinced themselves that things would magically work out, because the alternative was too painful to contemplate, so in that sense they were willfully denying reality, but it still seems odd to me to describe this as concealment of risk.