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Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power: Maddow argues that, through political innovation and privatization that ensures that most Americans don’t even notice that we’re at war, war has become far too easy for America, draining our resources and making it impossible to achieve other national objectives. She’s biting on the privatization/executive overreach/Congressional spinelessness/careful organization of the military to make its human costs less noticeable to groups that are more likely to vote, but I was more shocked by the part about how our nuclear arsenal is falling apart despite all the money we’ve spent on it: “Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I don’t know about other countries, but that’s what we admit to. And we’re regarded as top-drawer, safety-wise.” “[A] few months later, we discovered that we had erroneously shipped to Taiwan four nose-cone fuzes designed to trigger nuclear explosions in lieu of the helicopter battery packs Taiwan had requested, and that it had taken a year and a half to discover the accidental switcheroo.” And that’s not even getting into the mold on the nukes. Her prescriptions are simple but sadly hard to imagine: Congress should assert itself; military budgets shouldn’t be untouchable; war should, in a democracy, be very hard to start.
Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. The part behind the colon is only halfway accurate—Rosin is generally quite sensitive to the idea that big changes in the economy, in the US and the world, are changing gender relations in ways that aren’t zero-sum. Her basic thesis, again focused on the US with some comparative bits (including a chapter on “Asia” that is really a chapter on South Korea), is that women have been more flexible than men in response to tectonic social and economic changes. Women have entered the workforce, retrained for new jobs, gotten college degrees; meanwhile, men have been much less willing to change, whether that’s to do more child care or to enter historically feminized job categories like nursing where there’s job growth. As a result, women are more likely to decide that they don’t need a man who is neither a provider nor a homemaker, the basic reasoning being “I already have X kids, I don’t need X+1”—and even when X = 0, women are busy trying to establish themselves and don’t necessarily want to spend the time tending to a relationship that could otherwise be spent on career or school. While Rosen mentioned the theorists of “innate” male and female qualities, she repeatedly pointed out just how much socialization mattered, as evidenced by the rapid change we’ve seen recently. And for upper-class women who can navigate the still-strong bias against aggressive women, there is a cadre of men who are happy to live in new ways, though Rosin includes some accounts of high-flying women who were surprised to find that their partners weren’t among that cadre.
While it’s full of provocative statistics and anecdata that certainly spoke to my particular situation, the book could have used a much greater focus on class: it’s not just that manufacturing jobs are disappearing, it’s that lots and lots of jobs are hard to support a family on, and that’s a social choice, not just a phenomenon of lots of individual choices. US politics is also almost absent; while Rosen talks about changes in high-end businesses making it easier for women at the top to raise children, she doesn’t talk about government policy like mandatory leave for new parents. Nor does she discuss government employment, which (at lower levels) has historically been good for women but means the recession has hit them extra hard as states shed employees and (at higher levels) remains male-dominated in the US to the extent that we are still, somehow, talking about whether using contraception is your employer’s business. The “rise of women” has a long way to go, especially as long as it is framed as a comparative one. Red Families, Blue Families would be a good book to read this one to emphasize that, while Rosin does look at women and men across the economic spectrum, the meanings and long-term implications of these changes may be very different across that spectrum.
Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor: A somewhat more academic look at a community adjacent to the one he addressed in Gang Leader for a Day, this book paints a clear picture of why urban poverty is so hard to escape. Reading it often reminded me of how President Obama cited research on decision fatigue when he was explaining how he tried to routinize as many aspects of his day as possible, given how many big choices he had: constantly having to reassess your options (usually a bunch of risky, bad ones) is exhausting, and leaves little energy for longer-term planning. Venkatesh emphasizes the extent to which there is almost no formal law in the poor Chicago community he studied: the police are unlikely to come for anything short of murder, so disputes have to be resolved in other ways, which means that even the mechanisms of dispute resolution are constantly up for negotiation.
Entrepreneurs, and there are many, have to confront not just the risks we associate with that term, but also the threat of extortion from various parties (official and un-), the need to seek credit from loan sharks, and the complications of dealing with loiterers who may also be customers when they come across some money. “Imagine not only facing the burden of keeping a business solvent, but also inventing the means by which to obtain redress should something go wrong. The added taks of having to mete out the law when, for example, a customer steals or does not pay, is no small endeavor ….” When a gang leader tried to take over new areas, the lack of rules created huge uncertainties for everyone: “there was no single system in place that the gang could identify, challenge, and usurp. It was not as if Big Cat was forcibly taking over an established criminal justice institution, with courts, procedures of punishment and redress, facilities for incarceration, and so on.” Venkatesh suggests that the flexibility that develops as a result is both a survival tool and a constraint: people can’t build credit histories or resumes if they’re always doing different jobs in the underground economy. Even those with enormous reserves of energy often use it up on survival, or mediating conflicts that don’t even get recognized outside the community. This happens with community organizations, not just individuals, and is a huge constraint on the development of human capital. Ultimately, he suggests, nothing will change unless society at large is prepared to invest more resources in these desperately resource-poor communities.
Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. The part behind the colon is only halfway accurate—Rosin is generally quite sensitive to the idea that big changes in the economy, in the US and the world, are changing gender relations in ways that aren’t zero-sum. Her basic thesis, again focused on the US with some comparative bits (including a chapter on “Asia” that is really a chapter on South Korea), is that women have been more flexible than men in response to tectonic social and economic changes. Women have entered the workforce, retrained for new jobs, gotten college degrees; meanwhile, men have been much less willing to change, whether that’s to do more child care or to enter historically feminized job categories like nursing where there’s job growth. As a result, women are more likely to decide that they don’t need a man who is neither a provider nor a homemaker, the basic reasoning being “I already have X kids, I don’t need X+1”—and even when X = 0, women are busy trying to establish themselves and don’t necessarily want to spend the time tending to a relationship that could otherwise be spent on career or school. While Rosen mentioned the theorists of “innate” male and female qualities, she repeatedly pointed out just how much socialization mattered, as evidenced by the rapid change we’ve seen recently. And for upper-class women who can navigate the still-strong bias against aggressive women, there is a cadre of men who are happy to live in new ways, though Rosin includes some accounts of high-flying women who were surprised to find that their partners weren’t among that cadre.
While it’s full of provocative statistics and anecdata that certainly spoke to my particular situation, the book could have used a much greater focus on class: it’s not just that manufacturing jobs are disappearing, it’s that lots and lots of jobs are hard to support a family on, and that’s a social choice, not just a phenomenon of lots of individual choices. US politics is also almost absent; while Rosen talks about changes in high-end businesses making it easier for women at the top to raise children, she doesn’t talk about government policy like mandatory leave for new parents. Nor does she discuss government employment, which (at lower levels) has historically been good for women but means the recession has hit them extra hard as states shed employees and (at higher levels) remains male-dominated in the US to the extent that we are still, somehow, talking about whether using contraception is your employer’s business. The “rise of women” has a long way to go, especially as long as it is framed as a comparative one. Red Families, Blue Families would be a good book to read this one to emphasize that, while Rosin does look at women and men across the economic spectrum, the meanings and long-term implications of these changes may be very different across that spectrum.
Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor: A somewhat more academic look at a community adjacent to the one he addressed in Gang Leader for a Day, this book paints a clear picture of why urban poverty is so hard to escape. Reading it often reminded me of how President Obama cited research on decision fatigue when he was explaining how he tried to routinize as many aspects of his day as possible, given how many big choices he had: constantly having to reassess your options (usually a bunch of risky, bad ones) is exhausting, and leaves little energy for longer-term planning. Venkatesh emphasizes the extent to which there is almost no formal law in the poor Chicago community he studied: the police are unlikely to come for anything short of murder, so disputes have to be resolved in other ways, which means that even the mechanisms of dispute resolution are constantly up for negotiation.
Entrepreneurs, and there are many, have to confront not just the risks we associate with that term, but also the threat of extortion from various parties (official and un-), the need to seek credit from loan sharks, and the complications of dealing with loiterers who may also be customers when they come across some money. “Imagine not only facing the burden of keeping a business solvent, but also inventing the means by which to obtain redress should something go wrong. The added taks of having to mete out the law when, for example, a customer steals or does not pay, is no small endeavor ….” When a gang leader tried to take over new areas, the lack of rules created huge uncertainties for everyone: “there was no single system in place that the gang could identify, challenge, and usurp. It was not as if Big Cat was forcibly taking over an established criminal justice institution, with courts, procedures of punishment and redress, facilities for incarceration, and so on.” Venkatesh suggests that the flexibility that develops as a result is both a survival tool and a constraint: people can’t build credit histories or resumes if they’re always doing different jobs in the underground economy. Even those with enormous reserves of energy often use it up on survival, or mediating conflicts that don’t even get recognized outside the community. This happens with community organizations, not just individuals, and is a huge constraint on the development of human capital. Ultimately, he suggests, nothing will change unless society at large is prepared to invest more resources in these desperately resource-poor communities.
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