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William H. Davidow, Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet: Disappointing. First of all, Davidow can’t decide whether he means “internet” or “modern communication technologies.” Many of the things he describes as generating dangerous connections and thus dependencies on complex systems that can easily and quickly be brought down by small mistakes can equally be done by private systems, and in some cases were done by such systems linking only, for example, banks. Second, Davidow chooses to place blame at weird points: the internet is responsible for the dot-com crash not because dot-coms were internet companies, but because it allowed the rise of day traders, who invested even when the smart money had moved on. This is, to put it mildly, somewhat misleading about the role of fraud and insider self-dealing in handing out gifts to the well-connected; it’s true that there needed to be some suckers left to take the hit when reality emerged, but they’re not the ones I hold responsible (or think regulation should focus on) any more than the people who took out subprime loans are the “cause” of the current economic collapse. Davidow is also disappointingly short on solutions, which isn’t surprising if he hasn’t identified key causes.
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: A history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, from the African and Mediterranean antecedents, including Biblical arguments, to abolition, including the Haitian revolution (the only successful slave revolt) and the American Civil War. Davis covers a lot of ground, including the fear of slave rebellions in the US and the simultaneous denigration of African-Americans because they didn’t, largely, engage in armed insurrection, thus suggesting to even many antislavery whites that they were just not as brave as whites, because those whites couldn’t see the structural barriers in place (slave:free ratios, among other things, were very different in Haiti) or the other accommodations and rebellions in which slaves engaged. He emphasizes that abolition was always, except in the Civil War, accompanied by compensation for slaveowners (not for slaves)—even Haiti ultimately agreed to ruinous compensation for dispossessed owners in order to restore international trade. Meanwhile, the shift from production of valuable sugarcane to the non-money-generating food crops that accompanied the transition to freedom convinced many contemporary whites that freedom had been a disaster in Haiti. The emphasis on the overall Atlantic context was very informative for me.
Cele C. Otnes & Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding: Big, expensive weddings allow people, especially women, to feel like they’ve been touched by magic—to be special and unique and experience a magical moment marking a major life transition. They provide a happy unity of consumption and romantic ideals. There, I saved you a lot of time reading this book.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: The US did a series of terrible things to the Iraqi people, often pretty much the worst possible choice at any given time. I don’t want to downplay the human cost, but one way to read this book about the insulated lives of Americans within the Baghdad Green Zone and the truly stupid things they thought and then did is as a management book: It sets out very clearly the disastrous consequences of ignoring reality in favor of ideology, desires, and best-case scenarios.
Repeatedly, the US ignored people with actual experience in postwar management—or in some extra galling cases, removed them once they’d come in—in order to give jobs to (1) well-connected contractors or (2) young Republican operatives, often straight out of college or campaign jobs. Money gushed as from a slashed artery, but only into the coffers of American contractors or other wasteful projects, rather than being targeted to Iraqi needs and priorities. They routinely chose to imagine the best possible outcome in the best of all possible worlds—creating the most advanced stock exchange in the developing world, for example—and wasted huge amounts of money, time, and even lives when what would have helped was a stock exchange that was open. I’d known about the ill-timed de-Baathification of the army, but that kind of blunder was repeated fractally, including the decision that the accounts of state owned industries were so mixed up that it would be better to start from scratch, thus taking away the money that the marginally functional ones had on hand and giving a huge windfall to the worst-off ones. Often ideology was the extra toxin that ensured disaster: the guy brought in to run Iraqi health care (replacing a guy who had actual post-conflict medical management experience), a Republican who's managed an HMO in Michigan, instituted an anti-smoking campaign and made it his mission to make sure that Iraqis got used to paying for health care, instead of having it provided by the government, when what they needed was to get the standard drugs distributed to hospitals and clinics. (Of course that supposedly libertarian ideology went along with huge handouts to Republican donors who got no-bid, cost-plus contracts and used the money to buy themselves Hummers and import labor rather than hiring any Iraqis despite the massive and destabilizing unemployment making conditions worse.)
Imperialism comes off as a perniciously awful form of mismanagement: when you care only about your own priorities, and not those of the people you’re supposedly there to help, anything you do right will be unlikely and accidental. The book implicitly argues for doing good enough when a crisis happens, for figuring out what people need right now when disaster strikes and then building larger structures over the long term. (Chandrasekaran doesn’t address the decision to go to war in the first place, because his focus is on what happened once the Americans arrived to "govern," but he does suggest that the lack of planning and understanding was consistent over time.)
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: A history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, from the African and Mediterranean antecedents, including Biblical arguments, to abolition, including the Haitian revolution (the only successful slave revolt) and the American Civil War. Davis covers a lot of ground, including the fear of slave rebellions in the US and the simultaneous denigration of African-Americans because they didn’t, largely, engage in armed insurrection, thus suggesting to even many antislavery whites that they were just not as brave as whites, because those whites couldn’t see the structural barriers in place (slave:free ratios, among other things, were very different in Haiti) or the other accommodations and rebellions in which slaves engaged. He emphasizes that abolition was always, except in the Civil War, accompanied by compensation for slaveowners (not for slaves)—even Haiti ultimately agreed to ruinous compensation for dispossessed owners in order to restore international trade. Meanwhile, the shift from production of valuable sugarcane to the non-money-generating food crops that accompanied the transition to freedom convinced many contemporary whites that freedom had been a disaster in Haiti. The emphasis on the overall Atlantic context was very informative for me.
Cele C. Otnes & Elizabeth H. Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding: Big, expensive weddings allow people, especially women, to feel like they’ve been touched by magic—to be special and unique and experience a magical moment marking a major life transition. They provide a happy unity of consumption and romantic ideals. There, I saved you a lot of time reading this book.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: The US did a series of terrible things to the Iraqi people, often pretty much the worst possible choice at any given time. I don’t want to downplay the human cost, but one way to read this book about the insulated lives of Americans within the Baghdad Green Zone and the truly stupid things they thought and then did is as a management book: It sets out very clearly the disastrous consequences of ignoring reality in favor of ideology, desires, and best-case scenarios.
Repeatedly, the US ignored people with actual experience in postwar management—or in some extra galling cases, removed them once they’d come in—in order to give jobs to (1) well-connected contractors or (2) young Republican operatives, often straight out of college or campaign jobs. Money gushed as from a slashed artery, but only into the coffers of American contractors or other wasteful projects, rather than being targeted to Iraqi needs and priorities. They routinely chose to imagine the best possible outcome in the best of all possible worlds—creating the most advanced stock exchange in the developing world, for example—and wasted huge amounts of money, time, and even lives when what would have helped was a stock exchange that was open. I’d known about the ill-timed de-Baathification of the army, but that kind of blunder was repeated fractally, including the decision that the accounts of state owned industries were so mixed up that it would be better to start from scratch, thus taking away the money that the marginally functional ones had on hand and giving a huge windfall to the worst-off ones. Often ideology was the extra toxin that ensured disaster: the guy brought in to run Iraqi health care (replacing a guy who had actual post-conflict medical management experience), a Republican who's managed an HMO in Michigan, instituted an anti-smoking campaign and made it his mission to make sure that Iraqis got used to paying for health care, instead of having it provided by the government, when what they needed was to get the standard drugs distributed to hospitals and clinics. (Of course that supposedly libertarian ideology went along with huge handouts to Republican donors who got no-bid, cost-plus contracts and used the money to buy themselves Hummers and import labor rather than hiring any Iraqis despite the massive and destabilizing unemployment making conditions worse.)
Imperialism comes off as a perniciously awful form of mismanagement: when you care only about your own priorities, and not those of the people you’re supposedly there to help, anything you do right will be unlikely and accidental. The book implicitly argues for doing good enough when a crisis happens, for figuring out what people need right now when disaster strikes and then building larger structures over the long term. (Chandrasekaran doesn’t address the decision to go to war in the first place, because his focus is on what happened once the Americans arrived to "govern," but he does suggest that the lack of planning and understanding was consistent over time.)
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